Judge warns conman: You'll do time for tea

£550k luxury fraudster caught selling overseas brew

- TIM BUGLER

A conman is behind bars for a £550,000 fraud in which he sold luxury “Scottish-grown” tea from his Perthshire farm to posh hotels that he'd bought from overseas.

Thomas Robinson supplied Edinburgh’s Balmoral and other big hotels with “authentically Scottish” single-estate tea from his Wee Tea Plantation.

The chancer even claimed tea he supplied to five-star The Dorchester in London was “the Queen's favourite”.

In reality Robinson (55), who rented a former sheep farm in Perthshire, planted tea plants for show then imported more than a ton of tea from overseas and repacked it.

One expert said a kilo of quality tea from Africa could be sold for 100 times what it cost if it was passed off as being grown in Scotland. The scale of Robinson's lies was laid bare in a three-and-a-half-week long case at Falkirk Sheriff Court.

He was found guilty of defrauding tea growers of £274,354 and the hotels and tea companies of £278,634 — a total of nearly £553,000 — between January 2014 and February 2019.

Robinson denied the crimes, claiming paperwork for his defence had been destroyed in a flood and his electronic records had been lost.

The conman, also known as Tom O’Braan, bought tea plants from a nursery in Sussex called Plants4Presents.

He carried out his scam by showing tea plants to buyers such as those acting for Fortnum and Mason of London, where the wealthiest in society like to shop.

Other victims who bought the Wee Tea Plantation's supposedly single-estate Scottish-grown tea products included France's oldest tea house, Mariage Freres.