A conman jailed for three-and-a-half years over a bizarre £550,000 ‘Scottish tea’ scam which caught out a major Jersey business is set to walk free after serving just a small part of his sentence.
Thomas Robinson was jailed for three-and-a-half years last June, after being convicted of running a £550,000 fraudulent tea-growing scheme through his Wee Tea Plantation business.
The 55-year-old falsely claimed to be growing thousands of tea plants on a farm in Perthshire, allowing him to market them as premium “Scottish-grown” products.
In reality, the plants had been sourced cheaply from Europe before being sold on at a substantial mark-up to customers, including the Jersey Royal Company.
The fraud affecting the Jersey Royal Company took place between 2014 and 2018, before the business was sold to Albert Bartlett in 2024.
Robinson, who also used the names Thomas O’Brien and Tam O’Braan, made around £550,000 from the scam over a five-year period.
Other businesses caught up in the fraud included The Dorchester in London and the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh.
Robinson even claimed he was told the tea he supplied to The Dorchester was “the Queen’s favourite”.
A jury found him guilty of two counts of fraud following a three-week trial at Falkirk Sheriff Court before he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison at Stirling Sheriff Court.
The investigation began after Perth and Kinross Council checked whether Robinson held a food processing licence in 2017, leading to what Food Standards Scotland described as a “highly complex and protracted investigation”.
Scottish newspaper The Courier has now reported that Robinson has walked free after serving 13 months – just a third – under the new early release rules introduced in May to manage prison overcrowding in the country.
The newspaper reported that he was spotted “chatting to his lawyer, unaccompanied by guards” at a recent proceeds of crime hearing at Stirling Sheriff Court in which it was heard that he was believed to have profited from his criminal activity in the region of £1.142m – nearly £74,000 more than originally thought.
Earlier this month, the unusual case was made the subject of BBC One documentary Expert Witness, which looked at how specialist investigators solved the complex crime.
