Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode three – a bag for life

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1:18Today is the third episode of our investigative series, A Scottish Tea Mystery. So if you haven't heard episodes one and two, scroll back in your podcast feed now.

1:33Nicola Davis: Hi, I'm Nicola Davis, a science correspondent here at The Guardian. And this is the final episode of a special Science Weekly mini-series, A Scottish Tea Mystery, episode three, A Bag for Life.

1:51Nicola Davis: When Food Standard Scotland investigator Stuart Wilson had collected all the information he could on Tam O 'Brien and his supposedly Scottish teas the evidence pointed one way Neither the tea plants nor the vast majority of those finished products were genuine

2:13Nicola Davis: The plants had arrived in Scotland from the sunny shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy and Professor David Burslem had explored the origins of the process teas confirming most clearly did not come from Scottish soils And so Stuart set about finding out where they had come from We applied for warrants for his bank account and within that we identified two wholesalers of tea. So one wholesaler from Oxford area, another wholesaler from London area. So we went and visited them. We identified that over the period of roughly 2015 to 2019 he'd bought many hundreds of kilos of various tea types from both of these wholesalers.

2:59And I suppose ultimately when we balanced them all together the quantities were almost similar to what he'd sold to the hotels. There was one particular tea type that I remember called silver needles, and that's a really expensive tea type, and we knew that 13 kilos of silver needles had been sold to the Balmoral Hotel, and we were able to identify that in the week leading up to that sale at the Balmoral, he'd sourced 13 kilos of silver needles from the wholesalers.

3:31Nicola Davis: It wasn't just hotels and shops that had received fraudulent tea from TAM. Remember in episode one when he turned up at Richard's house with that big bucket of tea, claiming it had come from Richard's plants? The wholesaler explained that most of this business was conducted by email. An order would be made and then payment would be forthcoming and he would send to an address in Glasgow, actually. Just up the street, this very street that we're on now, actually. But the one occasion when he did actually meet him face to face, Tam came to his business premises in London and paid in cash for several kilos of a white peony tea.

4:12And the date of that was literally the week after the press visit to my plantation that precipitated the delivery of this bucket of tea two weeks later.

4:27Nicola Davis: And what about that office manager who was full of excuses and evasions any time the tea growers wanted to get hold of Tam? The office manager was sending emails signed off with a kiss at the end and this is somebody that none of us had ever met We were joking amongst ourselves that this was a little bit odd and that it was a little bit sort of forward perhaps and then we even joked that maybe this is just Tam pretending to be this person It turns out the growers were right in their suspicions Tam had taken control of a former employee's email address He'd taken the name of a genuine person who had had some dealings with him in the past and used that to pretend that he had this larger team and also just to fend off inquiries and requests

5:24Nicola Davis: Richard had his answers. But what about the claim that had always bothered me? That Salon du Tay award from Paris. So we spoke to many tea experts and nobody had heard of the Salon du Tay award. And we spoke to experts in France as well because the claim was that it had been presented in Paris. So that essentially we're able to say doesn't exist. It seems the Salon du Tay is just a normal, cosy tea room in Paris, which appears from the pictures online to be filled with trinkets and old books, not the sort of place that hands out international awards. And that wasn't the only rather fanciful claim Tam had made over the years that Stuart had to look into before taking Tam to trial.

6:12The London Silver Tea Exchange Award, so there is a tea shop in London, the London Tea Exchange I think it's called, so we spoke with the owner there and he says, no, we don't give out awards at all, we're simply a tea shop and we sell tea to customers who come in for a cup of tea. So in terms of the other things that were reported in the media, there were claims that he'd served in the army, there were claims that he was a multimillionaire, there were claims that he'd invented the bag for life and various other things. And we could find no evidence throughout the whole inquiry to substantiate any of those claims.

6:44That's astonishing. There was one, I think, where he said he had worked in bomb disposal. Yes. Yes, again. Quite a fanciful claim, one would suggest. So, no, there was no evidence to support any of these claims that we could find.

7:02My personal favourite is Tam's assertions that you can force tea like rhubarb. He gave us these protective tubes, the kind of tubes that the trees have put in beside the road, which he suggested would be excellent for helping to, as he described it, force the plant. He likened it to growing rhubarb under the sink in your kitchen. Which tea experts have told me is definitely not the way to grow it. Oh yes, of course you can force rhubarb. Because that's what he was saying. He managed to force the tea plants in two years because of his magic plastic. Which is just not true. Tea plants aren't like rhubarb.

7:40You know, rhubarb's a crown. It's a completely different plant. Absolute nonsense.

7:46Nicola Davis: A few other especially surprising claims reported by a journalist back in 2017 included that Tam had spent four years living on a canoe in the Amazon, was bitten by a deadly snake in Brazil, and had been shot at on the Thailand-Burma border. Huge, if true, as we say in the business. As for Stuart, he had all the evidence he needed in the bag. So he was charged with two counts of fraud or fraudulent schemes, which amounted to a grand total of about£550 ,000. And during the trial itself, other claims came unstuck. You might recall from episode one that Tam told Richard he was an agronomist. He told others he was a polymer scientist.

8:34Nicola Davis: That's how he ended up inventing, or not, the bag for life. Part of the ruse I suppose that he told to the plant growers was that he'd sold them as part of the package was these plastic guards which would go around the trees which were essentially just these green plastic things you see go around trees anyway but he'd also developed this particular plastic that you could put on the ground and it would insulate the ground and all that type of stuff and it would resist to elements so during the trial this was actually referenced by the procreator Fisco who showed him a photograph and she said, but that just looks like a bin liner.

9:14And his response was, and that's what you're meant to think. And it looks very much like a black bin liner. And I would be surprised if it wasn't a black bin liner. Oh my goodness me.

9:27Nicola Davis: Tam took the stand in his own defence. And essentially his evidence was it wasn't me, it was somebody else, what I've done is true. And if you don't believe me, that's on you. He claimed that anything that he could have provided in support of his position was either destroyed in a flood or lost by his IT tech chap. So he wasn't able ultimately to produce any evidence to support his position.

9:57Nicola Davis: And so when the time arrived for the jury to make their decision based on the evidence they'd seen and heard. They came back and there was no amendments or deletions, so they were content that every single part of both charges had been evidenced. Guilty. Tam was given a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence. But I have one more thing to admit to you. Tam O 'Brien wasn't his real name. He's actually called Thomas Robinson, although he also goes by Tom O 'Brien.

10:33Nicola Davis: Sitting in the tea room in Glasgow with Richard after hearing his journey with Thomas Robinson I wondered how he was feeling now about the verdict and about Robinson himself It was a relief to an extent I mean it was a pretty unambiguous verdict but the whole psychology of the fraudster I think is baffling and fascinating It feels like he couldn't have done all the things he did and maintained this level of lie and fabrication over a period of years without somehow just believing that it was normalized and he was doing something that wasn't really out of the ordinary or out of the legal process.

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12:26Nicola Davis: On the train up to Glasgow, as I'd been going back through all the old articles and notes to prepare for my interview with Richard, I'd been reflecting on my own role in the story. Alongside many other journalists, I'd reported something that turned out not to be true. My article, and all the others like it, had lent Robinson legitimacy, which he then traded on to draw in others. It was a really uncomfortable feeling. I'd also been duped by his cloak of credibility lent by others. Pictures and films of the tea plants, tea being sold in fancy hotels. I asked Richard how he thought about all this.

13:13he created this network that was sort of self-perpetuating to a degree and i think ultimately not enough people knew what was involved in tea to be able to point the finger directly and yes he told a lot of strange stories which in retrospect and when you add them all up together seem pretty preposterous but he was always quite good at leaving a little kernel of truth somewhere in the middle of the stories he told something that you couldn't quite say well that's wrong you think well I know that little bit is right so maybe I'm just missing something here maybe he is an absolute genius and nobody kind of wants to be the person who sort of pricks the balloon maybe it sounds a little like almost a house of cards if almost slightly propping up this elaborate story without really seeing the bigger picture of their role yes nobody was aware of the full picture we all had elements but weren't able to really see everything that was going on and piece together the sort of scale of the fraud.

14:17Nicola Davis: Even now, the consequences of Robinson's actions are being felt. Richard's plants didn't survive, although he has a few in his garden as a keepsake. A reminder of his dalliance into tea and a way to tell guests a very bizarre story.

14:38Paolo's unpaid bill has never been settled, although he did get one thing that money can't buy. I have a son which is 38 now and he was making his career around the world. And after the COVID, he said, I come back to Italy if you give me the tea plantation. I said, OK, you take the tea plantation, you come back. So misfortunes brought me to a good result because now he's running the business and he's taking my place and doing very well. A lot of unusual unpleasant things turn out to be unpleasant things. Like Voltaire in Candido.

15:21Paolo and his son might be successfully growing tea in Italy, partly because of Robinson. But what about in Scotland? I still get phone calls from people every single month wanting to put their life savings into growing tea because they think they're going to make loads of money from it.

15:37Nicola Davis: That's Beverly Clare Wainwright, the tea expert we heard from in episode one. I'm quite glad they come to me because I can at least give them the facts. You know, reality check. If you're going into something, do your research, understand what the pitfalls are. And if you're buying tea, I would say ask questions. When she moved back to Scotland after working at a tea estate in Sri Lanka, Beverly began to help all the people Tam had sold plants to. Eventually, she was even one of the people who reported Tam to Food Standards Scotland. I just thought this chap is just going to keep on lying and defrauding people.

16:16It seemed to me like it would just keep on going. And also, I'm the one that was fielding enquiries about growing tea. I didn't want people to get their fingers burnt, you know?

16:32Nicola Davis: But not everyone got their fingers burned because some of the later Scottish tea growers got the plants Paolo had sourced from Turkey Quite ironically our tea is doing quite well here It's from the Turkish Highlands I believe Isla Henderson initially bought 1 ,500 plants from Robinson and growing tea remains her full-time job We just thought that it sounded great for the west coast of Scotland. It's a very acid soil here and there's an awful lot of rain. Chi actually loves those conditions. So it's been doing quite well. Actually, we've had about an 80 % success rate, which I think is quite good.

17:13We have about 7 ,000 plants now. So we actually have bought more from Paolo. Directly, without the middleman. Without the middleman, thank goodness.

17:27Nicola Davis: What's different is the people growing tea in Scotland today aren't selling big batches. They can't. They're producing very small quantities, so much so that some of them are pooling their efforts. We're making a group tea because we wouldn't have had enough leaf for the machinery in year one when our plants were four years old. This year they made 12 kilos of processed tea, equivalent to about 4 ,000 pots worth. So it's very small batches still, but we've doubled our yields from last year. Now the plants are a little bit older. They're taking about seven years to sort of grow to optimum yield here in Argyle anyway.

18:07I've actually treated myself to some very expensive single estate tea grown in Angus, not too far from Dundee. I've been reliably informed it comes from a tea plantation that was started before Tam burst onto the scene. and I have to say it's delicious and goes to show what Scotland can produce.

18:29Isla is even taking part in her own tea experiments. Strathclyde University actually approached us. They've provided us with an autonomous and sensor-equipped robotic mower which now keeps the weeds down in the plantation because I'm encouraging green manure crops as an understory crop in my tea plantation which fixes nitrogen so I'm avoiding the use of nitrogen fertilizers. I have a few experts working on it one of them's a biomimicry sort of robotics expert and so it's really interesting. It's an exciting time for tea in Scotland once more and this time it's for real. Despite everything though, it was Tam O 'Brien who catalyzed the industry.

19:18I've thought about this myself and I think that ironically we may not have done it without him. I mean, because we may have found plants elsewhere, but initially we'd heard about it from him. So we may not have thought of it, we may have thought of another crop, you know.

19:40Nicola Davis: But when I asked Richard about whether Tam could truly take credit for where tea was headed in Scotland now, he was keen to point out recognition should probably go to someone else. It's true that he did spark a lot of interest in the potential for Scottish tea, but it was all based on a lie. I think the fact that there are established plantations in Scotland doing well are more a tribute to one grower in the north of Italy, providing us with viable plants. Has this put you off drinking tea at all, Richard? Are you still a fan of tea or do you drink coffee now instead? I continue to be a fan of tea.

20:28I realise I'm not going to make my millions out of a tea plantation, but there's plenty other ways to be involved in tea. I enjoy talking about tea and encouraging people to drink the best tea that they possibly can. Although in Scotland we haven't been growing tea for very long, lots of different tea-growing regions around the world were really sort of instigated and grown by Scots. So we do have a very strong historical connection with tea. And there is a new chapter of Scottish-grown tea, which is exciting. It'll always be a small sort of boutique industry, but a really interesting one.

21:17A big thank you to everyone I spoke to for this mini-series, especially Richard Ross, Parra Zakera, Beverly Clare Wainwright, Stuart Wilson, Isla Henderson, Professor David Burslem, as well as Drs Amanda Lloyd and Manfred Beckman from Aberystwyth University, and Professor Russell Frew, co-founder and chief scientist at Orotain, a forensic investigation company that verifies the origins of products.

21:45Nicola Davis: Our podcast has referred to the Wee Tea Plantation. This is not to be confused with the Wee Tea Company, a retailer that does not grow tea themselves. They did supply tea purporting to be grown by Tam O 'Brien at his plantation, but they were unaware of his fraudulent activity and sold the tea in good faith. They said to us they are a separate small business who supply teas from trusted and verifiable international suppliers.

22:21Nicola Davis: A Scottish Tea Mystery was reported and presented by me, Nicola Davis. It was produced by Madeleine Finlay. The sound design was by Joel Cox. And the executive producer was Ellie Buey.

22:37This is The Guardian. You