to acquire

them when the Stones owned it.

I'm not sure if you knew Jason Engel or the Stones.

Yes, I know Jason well.

Yeah, so I'd met Jason, I'd seen the product, then Stones reached out to me about four years ago or so, and so I got pretty deep into behind the scenes at the company.

You know, it's no secret there were some problems there at the company from a company operations standpoint, not from a product standpoint.

But super cool product, you know, I really, looked at Classic Recreations as a tie to, because of the carbon, that we could tie to the European supercar buyer, but bring them into an American performance car.

So walk us through a little bit of that process.

It's also fair to say we had another guest on the recording with us, the subtle purr of a GM 6.2 liter V8.

Moving at the speed of mobility, this is AutoVision News Radio with Karl Anthony in Detroit, Michigan.

Velocity is a luxury lifestyle brand that's rooted in iconic American vehicles.

We tailor these vehicles to each individual client, focus on the highest level of craftsmanship and materials that we can use, and we build cars that are meant to be driven, they're meant to be enjoyed, and they're built to be passed on to future generations.

Velocity wasn't always that.

It started with me buying a Ford Bronco, getting it home, and it was a non-restored truck.

It had multiple oil leaks, didn't run well, couldn't keep it driving sort of on the road.

What defines a Restomod? What is meant by that term?

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.

[instrumental music] There was one particular tea type that I remember, uh, 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.

That's how he ended up inventing, or not, the Bag for Life.

Stuart began by going around all the hotels and companies that had purchased tea from Tam.

We knew from the media articles that tea was being sold in some hotels, the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, The Dorchester in London, Fortnum & Mason in London, Mariage Frères in Paris, and two or three others.

So let's go to them and identify what they'd bought or what they thought they'd bought and how much they'd paid for these tea types.

So there was a, a couple of them where there maybe had been a, a non-disclosure agreement was signed between the wee tea plantation and the hotel.

Let me just say here, it is very unusual for a hotel buying tea to sign an NDA.

NDA.The next aspect then was to look at the tea growers and recover evidence of their transactions, which would provide supporting evidence to the fact that the tea plants they were buying were acclaimed to be 100% Scottish.

Now that came to a head when we were contacted by a chap from Italy who told us that he was engaged with Tam O'Brien over many months and years from around about the 2014-2015 time, and he had sold him upwards of about 40 or 50,000 plants.