A man who falsely claimed to be cultivating premium Scottish tea has been found guilty of orchestrating a £550,000 fraud targeting luxury hotels, retailers, and aspiring growers.
Thomas Robinson, who also goes by Thomas O’Brien or Tam O’Braan, deceived high-profile clients including The Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh and The Dorchester in London by selling imported tea under the guise of being grown in the Scottish Highlands.
Operating under the name The Wee Tea Plantation, Robinson marketed varieties such as Dalreoch White, Highland Green, and Scottish Antlers Tea as locally farmed produce from his rented land near Loch Tay in Perthshire. In reality, the tea had been bought cheaply from abroad, repackaged, and sold at highly inflated prices.
Falkirk Sheriff Court heard that Robinson also defrauded genuine Scottish tea-growing hopefuls by selling them imported plants at premium prices, falsely claiming they were cultivated in Scotland. Between 2015 and 2016, he sold 22,000 plants at £12.50 each, having purchased them from Italy for just three euros apiece.
Prosecutors described Robinson as creating “the CV of a fantasist”, falsely claiming to be a millionaire scientist, a bomb disposal expert, and even the inventor of the supermarket “bag for life”. He boasted of developing a revolutionary biodegradable polymer that could accelerate tea plant growth – which experts later dismissed as a simple bin liner.
The scam extended to misleading hospitality clients, with marketing material stating his teas were sourced from “our farming heartland in Perthshire and Dumfries and Galloway” appearing on menus such as the Balmoral’s luxury Palm Court selection. He even claimed that tea supplied to The Dorchester was “the Queen’s favourite”.
To maintain the illusion, Robinson staged visits using shop-bought plants from Sussex when potential buyers requested site inspections. One Dumfries-based grower was promised yields of 100kg of premium tea within a year, but after seven years, managed just 100g.
The fraud came under scrutiny in 2017 when Perth and Kinross Council investigated his food processing credentials, prompting a wider inquiry by Food Standards Scotland’s food crime unit.
Robinson denied all charges, blaming the absence of paperwork on a flood and telling jurors: “I wanted to leave something that would stand in the history of tea.” However, after a three-week trial, the jury returned a guilty verdict after six hours of deliberation.
He is due to be sentenced at a later date and also faces proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
