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Archive for February, 2023

Can’t Have Your Pension Now (and Don’t Even Talk to Us)

Pension letter 1

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has chosen rather questionable pension providers that ‘cover up’ for the company’s abusive behaviour

TODAY we resume the series not because of progress but due to a lack of progress. We set some deadlines or ultimatums and those have already been missed/exceeded by over a week. The short stories, as we shall tell them in the coming days, might not be applicable to all pension providers in the UK, only at least two of them — the ones I’ve dealt with personally for months already (as did former colleagues).

Before we share some audio of conversations (likely some time tomorrow or later this week) let’s just say that this is still an ongoing investigation. At least 2 people were saying they cannot find anything about me on their system. Upon escalation, however, a “Standard Life” supervisor or line manager or whatever (Leah Brown) said the pension had been transferred (why could her colleagues not see the name?) but still refused to give all sorts of critical information. This was done without any authorisation from those impacted and, yet worse, without even notifying them that it happened.

This investigation of ours follows some pension-related abuses at Sirius, as covered here back in December (we shared some letters too). It was escalated further in light of two revelations: 1) the older pension ‘vanished’. 2) the existing one is being elusive, the provider evasive, and those who phone to ask about it are being provided with only “template” responses.

At first, I had to submit complaints to them at least twice only to finally receive a phonecall (about 3 weeks late). At a later stage they sent out an E-mail:

Dear Roy,

Thank you for contacting [redacted].

Following on from our conversation on Friday the 6^th of January 2023, I can confirm your employer has now sent us over the contributions for October and November.

I’ve arranged for a contribution history to be sent to your home address within 10 working days.

If you need any more help, we have a new alternative way for you to make your request digitally. You can securely confirm your details and send your request to our team *here.*
[redacted]

We would also appreciate if you could click on the link below and let us know how we did today.

Kind Regards,

[redacted]

[redacted] Helpdesk

I then responded:

Dear [redacted] (or colleague),

There seems to be about 5000 pounds missing. The statement was received by post, but it lacks about 5 years of my pension — money passed to you from another provider back in 2016. Please phone us, as before, to clarify why the statement omits this. I’m on [redacted]

My reference number is [redacted]

Regards,

They never responded to this. They never followed up at all.

After a long while (maybe days) I said:

Please phone me and my wife ASAP. We both have pensions with you and it is a matter [that's] urgent because:
a) there seems to be a lot of “missing” money
b) the employer may be committing fraud
c) I am a whistleblower (see (b)), so they might try to retaliate

Regards,

PS – call me today, it is very urgent.

There were several more messages like this (about 5 in total, sent days apart).

They did not reply to this either. Days later I phoned them up and they lied to me. They gave false, empty assurances. I sent the following:

Hi,

Your handling of clients is totally irresponsible and completely unacceptable. You did not reply to any of my urgent E-mails (about 5 of them), so after a week I phoned you up, at my expense, and spoke for nearly an hour with [redacted]. He later spoke to my wife as well.

We both demanded written assurances that the former employer cannot plunder the pension like it did with our previous one. You said you would send us written assurances within 10 working days. Today we finally received two letters, but those are just balance statements (like a template reply) and nothing else. It’s a repeat of what you sent us before. It’s redundant. Nothing at all was written for us. In other words, [redacted] gave us false verbal assurances and you gave us nothing at all.

Hence, I hereby demand that you send us the money of our current balance (yes, I am aware of the very high taxes). Phone us immediately. We live nearby and will come to collect our money ASAP.

You failed us repeatedly. You failed numerous times. You gave false assurances. You moreover fail to heed our warning about an employer (your client) that plunders people’s pensions. This bodes well for the pension sector as a whole.

Please phone us now to arrange collection of our funds.

At this stage we already spoke to other victims; we suspected they had paid us salaries using our own money (our pensions) without telling us. Or maybe someone paid his mortgage using our pension money. Whatever it is, many people’s money seems to have gone “missing”.

I wrote to them again:

Hi [redacted],

My wife and I still wait for the letters you promised us. If we don’t hear back in the next day or so, we’ll take this public.

That was over a week ago. They just lied over the telephone (we have that recorded as proof) and they never responded to any E-mail. It’s as if their policy became, “do not speak to the client” (if the client phones us, lie to the client).

And we just got the phone bill 4 days ago. We paid almost 20 pounds for phonecalls (to just one pension provider, not even counting the other one).

A financial firm that kept lying or made false promises would typically not survive, would it?

Among the other expenses in the phone bill:

08 Feb
13:10
[redacted]
Calls to UK landlines
00:25:06
£5.94

27 Jan
09:20
[redacted]
Calls to UK landlines
00:45:53
£10.51

27 Jan
09:19
[redacted]
Calls to UK landlines
00:01:12
£0.46

This story isn’t over and it’s still an ongoing dispute. The other pension provider is even more scandalous, but we’ll cover that separately (some former colleagues are also “on the case”).

As one former colleague put it, “I was in the [redacted] one and got the weird e-mails saying some payments were missing but when I got a statement from them they had all been fixed” (or so we’re told; there are other issues).

The bottom line is, if you work for a company that has gone rogue and is acting ‘dodgy’ (British slang), then you might want to check what pension provider it chose and what happens ‘behind the scenes’. They may be arranging the looting of staff’s salaries (or partial wage theft) under the guise of “pension”.

Multifocal Necrotizing Encephalitis and Myocarditis (Brain and Heart Damage) After BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccination Against COVID-19

New (but not in the mainstream media, just in scientific literature)

Description reproduced in case Google censors his videos again:

Multifocal Necrotizing Encephalitis and Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccination against COVID-19, (1 October 2022)

www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/10/10/1651

76-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease

Died three weeks after third COVID-19 vaccination

May 2021, ChAdOx1 vaccine

July 2021, Pfizer vaccine

December 2021, Pfizer vaccine

Family of the deceased requested an autopsy,

due to ambiguous clinical signs before death.

PD was confirmed by post-mortem examinations.

Signs of aspiration pneumonia and systemic arteriosclerosis

Histopathological analyses of the brain

Acute vasculitis (predominantly lymphocytic)

Multifocal necrotizing encephalitis

Pronounced inflammation

Glial and lymphocytic reaction

In the heart

Signs of chronic cardiomyopathy

Mild acute lympho-histiocytic myocarditis and vasculitis

Patient had no history of COVID-19

Immunohistochemistry for SARS-CoV-2 antigens (spike and nucleocapsid proteins) was performed.

Only spike protein but no nucleocapsid protein could be detected,

within the foci of inflammation, brain and heart

Spike protein detected in the endothelial cells of small blood vessels.

Quotes from the paper

Since no nucleocapsid protein could be detected, the presence of spike protein must be ascribed to vaccination rather than to viral infection.

The findings corroborate previous reports of encephalitis and myocarditis caused by gene-based COVID-19 vaccines.

A causal connection of these findings to the preceding COVID-19 vaccination was established by immunohistochemical demonstration of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

The methodology introduced in this study should be useful for distinguishing between causation by COVID-19 vaccination or infection in ambiguous cases.

Clinicians should take note of such case reports for the sake of early detection and management of such adverse events among their patients.

A thorough post-mortem examination of deaths in connection with COVID-19 vaccination should be considered in ambiguous circumstances, including histology.

Clinical History

First vaccination in May 2021 (ChAdOx1)

He experienced pronounced cardiovascular side effects

After the second vaccination in July 2021 (BNT162b2)

Family noted obvious behavioral and psychological changes (e.g., he did not want to be touched, anxiety, lethargy, social withdrawal)

Striking worsening of his PD symptoms

2 weeks after the third vaccination

Suddenly collapsed

Collapsed again 2 weeks after, died shortly thereafter

Clinical diagnosis was death due to aspiration pneumonia.

Pensions Looted or Gone ‘Missing’

Wanna get your money? Over your dead body!

money-dead

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is under ongoing investigation by former staff; it seems plausible that many people’s pensions just ‘vanished’

THIS series isn’t quite over yet. It slowed down a bit because of ongoing inquires, which are slow to progress because of stonewalling and stalling tactics. To give a rough outline of what’s to come, we’re going to look into two British pension providers, which are mysteriously evasive (we’ve recorded calls too; we may need that to defend our allegations). We’ll then go back to Sirius and discuss what happened. It seems like we’re in a similar situation to that of many other British workers* and even of workers globally (the economy isn’t in a good shape; hours ago Reuters said “U.S. household debt jumps to $16.90 trillion”).

About 2 hours ago Ryan in IRC said that he had experienced similar things in the US. He said: “You mean like that union pension that they said I’d get and now the union doesn’t exist and nobody could find the pension money? Very common in blue collar jobs that have a union.”

We heard similar stories from other Americans. It seems like every 1-1.5 decades this is being done. Many aren’t even aware that this is done until they approach pension age range.

As of December, I’m no longer working in Sirius and neither does my wife (summary of the reasons here). We decided to quote/cite a final letter. But nothing was final. The company was trying to get out of a deep hole — a gaping hole full of scandals. Sirius was hoping there would be no further digging, even when further investigations had already begun and were coordinated for better progress/effect.

Over in my personal blog I began — back in December in fact! — to look into the pension situation, only days after I had resigned [1, 2] and the following month it turned out that it was exceptionally difficult to track down the pensions. By January I had contacted 3 pension providers [1, 2, 3] and also tried the pension tracker, regulator etc. Totally useless. Earlier this month I wrote about the preliminary findings [1, 2, 3] and began making logs in text and audio (while informing upfront those whom I recorded over the telephone).

Judging by publicly-accessible documents (downloadable from Companies House), the latest pension provider cites “COVID-19″ and “war in Ukraine” as financial risks (we’ll spare the screenshots/link as at this point we don’t want to name or show the name of any pension provider). It is a company just about a decade old and that in itself is worrying; will it even be around at all decades from now?

As for Sirius, the company has in effect vanished. It went into hiding, the bosses don’t respond to E-mails asking about the company’s physical address (for legal papers regarding a potentially criminal matter). They know they could be forced to go to court or face a government investigation. Some clients of the company are fully aware of it, just like former and current staff. Many have been reading this series.

To one person I said: “I feel a strong moral obligation to bring to your attention new revelations about the company I left 2 months ago (I joined the company 12 years ago). Sirius is not what it seems to outsiders; the company is routinely breaking laws (even very basic and fundamental laws). It has apparently plundered the xxxxx pension of not only existing workers but past workers too (alumni from over a decade ago). It cannot be located. Several people contacted xxxxx and even management insists it cannot be spoken about. The company is effectively hiding and is refusing to provide the address to send legal papers to (the company charged its registered address 3 times last October… to the address of an accounting firm!). I’m not the only person who is concerned about this. Sirius uses false pretences and doesn’t even meet SLAs; sometimes the CEO covers shifts while not equipped with tools, knowledge, user account, monitoring etc. You’re paying for service ‘in absentia’. The company is running not only out of money (debt) but also staff. It operates through several shells now. It tricked staff into participating in this shell game (as explained in here, dating back to 2019 when mysterious NDAs were signed and xxxxx moved to another country after his divorce).”

“Thanks very much Roy for the information,” said the respondent. “We’ll investigate. I hope you’re well.”

This seems like a common theme (see footnote below), so we shall look deeper and deeper into it. If the pension providers continue to stonewall (we gave a final deadline/ultimatum today), we’ll resume the series as soon as this weekend. A lack of response is in itself rather revealing; repeated lies and false promises also speak volumes.
_____
* Days ago “Which?” picked up this topic, stating: “We investigate why so [many] people lose touch with their savings, and challenge volunteers to trace their pension pots” (they didn’t stop there; in later days there was a podcast about it, saying: “We explain how you can go about rescuing those all-important savings” (notice the word, “rescuing”).

So Far This Year 75,717 Deaths in England and Wales, Compared to 58,461 in the Same Period in 2019

I HAVE just grabbed the latest data, which was published 20 minutes ago. Be careful not to read government spin or ONS’s attempt to ‘editorialise’ this data, basically comparing peak pandemic years to the present instead of pre-pandemic times. Here are the numbers of deaths for 2019:

2019 deaths

Compare to 2023:

2023 deaths

That’s an increase by 29.51% or 30% if you round it up.

Here is the official data:

It’s hard to trust the government on such stuff because it was complicit in a botched reponse and would rather cover up not just what happened in the past but what is happening at present.

Sirius Open Source Seems to Have Done a Run on the Pension/Bank

Video download link | md5sum 13ba109b0a99e32cf821626a724004c8
Dude, Where is My Pension?
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Today we commenced a multi-part mini-series about pensions and what happens when they suddenly vanish and nobody is willing to explain where all the money went

THE Sirius ‘Open Source’ scandals are so many and new ones are being unearthed.

Several dodgy things like NDAs and illegal contract-signing should have served as warning signs; companies that are operating through shells don’t typically do so for benign reasons and what about pensions of staff?

As we noted here before (along with hard evidence), the company was failing to pay into the pension schemes while at the same time not sending payslips to staff (that’s illegal by the way). So now, after leaving the company, we examine the aftermath. There are many skulls/skeletons in this closet.

The above video talks about pensions in general (with limited focus on the UK’s practices and laws) and explains in rather general terms what happened in Sirius.

The Original Sirius ‘Open Source’ Pension Has Suddenly Vanished

Techrights: Wednesday, Feb 8, 2023: Sirius 'Open Source' Pensiongate: An Introduction

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ series continues in the form of a mini-series about pensions; it’s part of an ongoing investigation of a deep mystery that impacts people who left the company quite a long time ago and some of the lessons herein are applicable to any worker with a pension (at times of financial uncertainties)

IT has been about a week since we ended the series about my former employer and opportunistic CEO, who carried the term “Open Source” in vain (there’s a relatively short summary of the other issues). My wife resigned at the same time as me and she too has been attempting to understand what happened to the pensions.

Yes, pensions (plural).

Back in 2016 the pensions were changed and the old one seemingly evaporated. Former staff (that had left the company already) wondered what happened. These things could not be tracked down and there were obstacles impeding those desperate to find out. The Pension Tracker and Regulator were of no use, either. The government isn’t helping.

In the upcoming Sirius (pensiongate) articles we’re going to look at what happens when British workers suddenly discover that a pension simply vanished, even if the paperwork with all the references and the names is still fully intact. Even large pension providers are implicated in this, and it is unclear if they facilitate so-called ‘liberation’ schemes that let people plunder other people’s money. I wrote about this last month in my personal blog, but this series looks at it from another angle.

Generally speaking, what good are pensions when pension providers can certainly collapse or if the company offering a pension to staff collapses (and steals everyone’s money in the process)? How is that financial security? Seems more like a Ponzi scheme with a clock set to detonate everything a decade or more later. The so-called “financial industry” is not an industry and economics isn’t a science but a religion.

“Stock market pensions force us to give money to billionaires or else we don’t get pensions,” to quote someone from IRC (last night). “That’s the point.”

My best friend warned me about this over a decade ago. Are pensions any safer than bank accounts? And what will large technology companies do after economic downturns? Zoom is the latest to lay off loads of workers.

In the case of Sirius, existing and past staff aren’t fully aware of what’s happening. After about 3 hours waiting and speaking over the telephone (at great expense to myself) I think I’m ready to establish and report some uncomfortable facts. Colleagues might want to know and deserve to know what’s really happening. Some might to take what’s left in the pension, even with 55% tax, before the company once again plunders people’s pensions, as it apparently did before. I spoke to both pension providers and it’s rather revealing. They too would find it illuminating.

We already consider suing the company, which is effectively in hiding, but if it files for bankruptcy in the process, then only the lawyers will win. If we pass this on to other former staff, which is impacted and may help organise class action, it’s the same problem. The company Sirius already operates through several tiny shells in several countries. It’s most likely about evading liabilities (business and personal).

In the next part we shall take a look at some of the substance and highlight how this establishes a pattern of deceit and backstabbing.

England and Wales (Most of UK) Deaths Rose From 11,740 in 2019 to 14,137 in the Same Period This Year

Sarah Caul’s (ONS) latest update is rather misleading. It says: “In the week ending 27 January 2023 (Week 4), 14,137 deaths were registered in England and Wales; 579 of these deaths mentioned “novel coronavirus (COVID-19)”, accounting for 4.1% of all deaths.”

They then try to present it a) as a decline (compared to winter’s peak, not compared to prior years) and b) nothing to do with COVID-19.

Comparing this data to pre-COVID-19 levels, we actually see an increase of 20.41%.

Nice “end of pandemic” you got there… I’ve not compared by age groups, but if prior weeks’ data can be considered something to judge by, this impacts all age groups. Not good.

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