A fraudster who sold fake "Scottish-grown tea" to prestigious hotels including Edinburgh's Balmoral and London's Dorchester has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.
Thomas Robinson, 55, operated a £550,000 scam between 2014 and 2019 under the alias Tam O' Braan, trading as The Wee Tea Plantation.
He deceived luxury establishments by selling imported tea as Scottish produce, offering varieties with names like Highland Green, Silver Needles and Scottish Antlers Tea.
Robinson also targeted aspiring tea growers, selling them 22,000 plants at £12.50 each that he claimed were "specially engineered" for Scotland's climate.
In reality, he had imported the plants from Italy for approximately £2 each, making almost £275,000 from these sales alone.
Robinson claimed his tea was grown on farmland in Perthshire and Dumfries and Galloway, but investigators discovered he had purchased it from a wholesaler in Oxford and resold it at vastly inflated prices.
The conman created an elaborate personal mythology, telling customers he was a former bomb disposal expert who had lived in the Amazon and invented the "bag for life".
He boasted to the Dorchester Hotel in 2017 that his tea was "the Queen's favourite".
Thomas Robinson, 55, operated a £550,000 scam between 2014 and 2019
STV
Media outlets were also deceived, with one magazine feature describing Robinson as having previously lived "on a canoe in the Amazon, bitten by a deadly snake in Brazil and shot at on the Thailand-Burma border" before turning to tea.
During his trial, prosecutors described his claims as the "CV of a fantasist".
The fraud began to unravel when genuine tea growers discovered Robinson had populated the Balmoral Hotel's Palm Court luxury tea menu with Scottish brands.
Richard Ross, who bought 500 plants from Robinson in 2015, said: "I heard about the Balmoral tea list and decide to go and have a look. He'd taken names of genuine plantations but no-one involved in the actual plantations had heard they were selling to The Balmoral and that's because none of them had produced any tea from their plants."
The fraud began to unravel when genuine tea growers discovered Robinson had populated the Balmoral Hotel's Palm Court luxury tea menu with Scottish brands
STV
In 2017, Perth and Kinross Council began checking whether Robinson held a food processing licence.
Food Standards Scotland was simultaneously alerted, and their investigation quickly established that Robinson's tea likely originated from Sri Lanka or India rather than Scotland.
Lead investigator Stuart Wilson said: "It didn't take long to establish that the tea he was selling to the hotels was being bought from wholesalers, likely to have originated in Sri Lanka or India. He'd created such a story that people were taken along."
The Balmoral Hotel said it was "shocked and devastated" when the fraud was discovered.
General manager Andrew McPherson said: "To have been deceived in such a calculated manner left us all profoundly disappointed and embarrassed. As the hotel general manager, I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to everyone affected by this tea incident, particularly our loyal guests, who trusted in the authenticity and quality of our offerings."
Many of the plants sold to genuine growers died or failed to thrive.
Islay Henderson, who bought 1,500 plants from Robinson for her Argyll and Bute plantation, said: "He told us we were buying tea (plants) that were selectively grown in Scotland for 11 years, so we thought we had Scottish seed that had already been trialled. When we realised they weren't actually from Scotland, it was quite a worry. We felt really lied to."
Robinson denied the fraud at trial, claiming paperwork that would have proved his innocence had been destroyed in a flood.
Stuart Wilson noted Robinson's unusual behaviour: "Fraudsters will do whatever it take to continue their lies but once caught they tend to diminish away into the background - but Tam O'Brann, or Thomas Robinson, was quite happy to stand up in court and continue his lies."
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