peaking to pension schemes can be a massive waste of time. They are good at amassing people’s money and little other than that. Last week I spent over half an hour on the phone with Standard Life. They could not locate my pension! Nothing helped. They sent me to “Web sites” and I spent a weekend trying to find papers from 12 years ago. Now, with all the references and codes, they still say there is no record of those. Not my name, not the scheme number… nothing!

And they tried to send me astray to some “Web site”… as if that would work better than a person from the company on the phone, with full access to all the people and relevant systems. This is corporate greed in action.

Having spoken to 3 pension providers so far this month, I’m beyond appalled by the state of that industry, which the government blindly protects (to maintain ‘calm’). In its financial filings in Companies House, one such provider cautioned about its state in light of “COVID-19″ and “War in Ukraine”.

If myself, a tech-literate person, struggles to locate such things, then what about old people who don’t use technology and barely use the telephone? What about relatives of dead people, whose pension funds they don’t even know by name (or number)? The government’s pension tracker does not even work. I tried it about 4 times. It doesn’t even bring up a complete list of companies. This is incredible!

So my advice to all people, in the UK if not elsewhere too, call your pension provider to actually affirm the accounts are actually there as stated. Do not take anything for granted. Study the financial state of those schemes; in some countries it is publicly accessible for free, e.g. via Companies House in the UK.

The government can try to blame this on Russia or “an act of nature” (Wuhan virus), but the bottom line is, people’s economic lifelines aren’t safe and nobody in the media seems to be talking about it. Maybe they worry it would cause a panic and a run on the bank (or on pension schemes; people emptying their pension funds would open a whole new jar of worms, such as old people who suddenly lack a pension and rely on the government for food and heating… some already get called the “working poor” and rely on food banks).

The global system of finance is failing more and more people over time. The capital has been captured by the few.

I eventually found a “lead” (after more than half an hour spoken to a lady called Leah Brown at Standard Life). She suddenly could (unlike her colleagues) see the pension was moved to another provider in 2016. She did not, however, say which company did this and was very evasive about the whole thing, hoping to deflect to the Pension Regulator while acknowledging they almost never sent me any communications about anything. This seems to have become “normal”; they don’t inform people of anything.

In summary, they more or less lied to me about having nothing on their system about my account; upon escalation they suddenly knew the year of some change, less than 7 years ago (when you phone them up they say they retain the full audio of calls for up to 7 years, so why can’t they retain that much in actual records of pension schemes?).

To be continued…

n Tuesday we’ll get some more mortality numbers from ONS, but in the meantime it’s hard to trust their output. As just noted, I’ve not received any clarification or response to them (they ask people to give them up to 10 days) and some already file formal complaints about ONS deceiving/misleading the public: “In Nov 2022 we (Professor Fenon and team) made a formal complaint to the Statistic Regulator about the multiple anomalies in the ONS mortality by vaccination status reports. On 20 Jan 2023 they final [sic] responded and they agreed with our major concern that 1) the ONS data was based on a biased sample that under-represented the proportion of unvaccinated in England; and 2) the ONS data could not be used to make any assertions about vaccine efficacy or safety.”

Seeing what happened to the Swindon data, this certainly smells like cover-up of epic proportions/scale. We need to keep chasing them. They gradually run out of excuses and evasion tactics.

Video download link | md5sum 1207d847e412d9c458be0b408d43f29c
Sirius Bullying the Geeks, Driving Away Core Staff
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The managers at Sirius ‘Open Source’ have been bullying staff since 2019, even more so after the Gates Foundation passed money to the CEO under an NDA (while the company created a new shell in Washington); today we examine why the NDA was, in effect, very much like a bribe (or two bribes, depending on the kind of NDA) and then examine one memorable example of management abusing depressed and ill geeks

FOR a number of years already we’ve discussed NDAs as a form of bribery. NDAs should probably not be legal at all; people who use NDAs extensively cause harm; they typically engage in criminal business activities, which they’re desperate to hide (from the public, authorities etc.), so they pay ‘hush money’ in advance).

The video above discusses this post from 3 hours ago and explains why I’ve generally come to the conclusion that many types of NDA are indistinguishable from bribes. Had there been no strings attached, I’d be able to give more concrete evidence of what happened in 2019. I got a hint of it only once and Rianne was a witness too. She heard what the CEO told us. I did not record it, but in hindsight I ought to have recorded it (had I known in advance). This was never mentioned in writing after that (or before that). I suppose that verbal mention was itself a violation of the NDA, but maybe the CEO hoped nobody would notice. White-collar criminals love NDAs.

Either way, the main topic of the above video is how a colleague of mine, a highly technical person, was persistently bullied by vicious ‘managers’ without any relevant training. We never forgot this. We’ll always remember.

If you work in a company governed by trolls and managed by their cronies, get out for your own sake. It only goes downhill from there. Companies cannot recover from this and sellouts worsen things. They’re a final act of desperation, milking what’s left of the brand’s past reputation.

Summary: Today we begin to tell the story about a company that went astray, routinely lied to the staff, and even forced staff to sign bogus contracts under false pretenses

THE last part showed that Sirius ‘Open Source’ had begun ‘hiding’ behind Carbon Accounting, impeding potential lawsuits against the company — a company that now lacks an address and hides the address of its managers as well (one is in fiscal ‘exile’). We have good reasons to suspect that the company has many more skeletons in its closet; it would help explain unpaid and overdue bills (suppliers).

We’ve decided to cover contract-signing and related E-mails in two sub-parts, seeing that the subject may take a while to cover/digest and would likely overwhelm readers if covered in one day. Hence, today we’ll give the gist of the story about the new ‘shell’ of Sirius Corporation, Sirius ‘Open Source’. The next part will present some pertinent, original evidence. The public and even former Sirius employees ought to see it. It might alarm some of them.

To be very clear, “joining” Sirius ‘Open Source’ wasn’t up for debate. It was compulsory because of a contract-signing ritual they hadn’t bothered telling us about! I kept asking questions about it, but I was not receiving honest answers. That was 4 years ago! Things have not improved since then. Despite what was said in E-mail invitations, we did not receive any substantial training and we have good reasons to believe it was a “cover” for something else. In the invitations they didn’t include the contract-signing in the agenda (we’ll show evidence in the next part) and didn’t include the new contract, so they had us sign it blindly on the spot with threats if we don’t do so. In other words, under peer and time pressure we were made to agree to a contract not presented to us properly; the correct protocol is, send in advance or give it some time for a lawyer to check before consent (“implied consent” under pressure does not qualify).

As noted at the top, it’s probably too late to take action over this because the company is more or less ‘hiding’. The company did not give us a copy of the contact afterwards, so we don’t have a copy of what we actually signed. It was ad hoc and dodgy, so basically it’s like in the movies where they say “just sign below the dotted line”.

We said we would go to the company’s office for training and self-appraisal but the real purpose was signing a new contract, not presented in advance. That contract was for a new company, not the company that existed since 1998 (and has listed only one member of staff for years already; he meanwhile created Sirius Open Source Inc. in the US).

It should be noted that all this happened a month before a shell was created in the US after Gates Foundation had paid the CEO. This “training and workshop” meeting was clearly a decoy as they never mentioned signing of a contract with a new company. We’ll show the correspondence tomorrow. Any attempt to not attend the meeting was quickly met with threats from management. Wait for the E-mails to be shown, as careful redaction will be needed. Yes, they almost blackmailed everyone into coming under the guise of “training from [redacted]” — something that barely even happened! In other words, the real purpose was not spoken about; the real intention was to get us to sign some papers without telling us the reason. I asked about it (face to face) and they declined to comment. I remember this clearly. This was rather dodgy, even back then, not just in retrospect. They would pull us in one at a time for a ‘chat’ and then ask us to sign papers. This isn’t just some sneaky means of legal manipulation, it’s very likely unlawful, but no legal advisor was present and no record of the meeting was made, just a signature. So we (re)joined a company worth 1 pound! Yes, not kidding! We all signed up to join a new company with no assets. Meanwhile the absent CEO (hiding in another country, probably dodging financial liabilities) was failing to tell us he and a partner registered a third company; they operate in the US, at least on paper sometimes, so some people need to double-task in office hours in the US (evening in the UK). This whole “double job” situation (more duties, as it’s like we’re working in two virtual companies) didn’t mean increase in pay but greater uncertainty. We were meant to be covering up deception (pretending to be a US company) in addition to the technical work getting worse and worse.

It should be noted that Rianne’s contract (typically weekend cover) does not include lunch break, which is strange and legally dubious. Moreover, if you expand and cover also the US, then amend the contract accordingly. But at this point the company was likely operating outside the rules already. Anybody who works as a Support Engineer and also performs helpdesk tasks (as nobody works in weekends in the US) is suddenly put on a dedicated line for Reception in the US. The job itself changed.

It’s probably too late to hold the company legally accountable, but if the “court of public opinion” counts for anything, then today and tomorrow we objectively tell what happened.

fter two more days of failure to respond (for the second time already, spanning over one week!) I’ve decided to name and shame Aviva.

It is almost impossible to contact them [1, 2]. Their ‘apps’ and ‘Web sites’ are useless junk, so they’re in effect faceless banksters.

Even their online chat “app” never works.

I tried this on three different days, with multiple browsers, and it’s just hanging. Nobody is there.

What is this, a prank?

Maybe it’s time to report Aviva to regulators. They did not respond to my request to move my pension to another provider. They also failed to respond to a formal filing of a complaint. They never ever send any letters. It’s like a black hole for money.

This morning at around 10am (GMT) this page was updated.

A month ago:

First week of January:

Second week of January (this morning):

When does the the Office for National Statistics (ONS) plan to add the missing deaths? And will ONS carry on lying? Sarah Caul has some explaining to do.

As we can see elsewhere too, at this point the British government lies to the public (fake data) to cover up the fact COVID-19 and/or mass vaccination have had implication for cardiac health.

O it’s finally time!

This site is already 20 and the blog was created in 2004, i.e. 19 years ago. In the early days, the “golden era” (or dawn) of personal blogs, I used to write here every day. In 2006 a lot of focus shifted to Techrights, so this space became mostly neglected. That sort of changed last year, more so after I had resigned from my job. Now this blog is a lot more active (again) and has just crossed a nice milestone: 2,500 blog posts. Nowhere near the 35,000 of Techrights, but this blog is personal.