Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode three – a bag for life
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This is The Guardian.
Today 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.
Hi, I'm Nicola Davis, a science correspondent here at The Guardian, and this is the final episode of a special Science Weekly miniseries, A Scottish Tea Mystery, Episode 3, A Bag for Life.
Music
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. 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 processed 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. And 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.
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.
LAUGHTER
But the one occasion when he did actually meet him face to face, Tam came to his business premises in London and paid him cash for several kilos of a white peony tea. And 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.
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.
Richard had his answers. But what about the claim that had always bothered me? That Salon du Thé award from Paris?
So we spoke to many tea experts and nobody had heard of the Salon du Thé 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 Thé 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.
The London Silver Tea Exchange Award.
How did Food Standards Scotland trace Tam O’Brien’s tea supply sources?
So there is a tea shop in London, the London Tea Exchange, I think it's called.
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