Summary: The previous crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ merit letters of assurance, which were already promised by three people at NOW: Pensions (including a manager); if no such letter can be provided, specify the reasons and explain why three people who work at NOW: Pensions made promises to two people (in vain, followed by more lies to cover up the original lies)

MANY people are speaking about pensions today. France is checking whether Macron did something unconstitutional by sentencing millions of people to two additional years of work in their 60s (not something they consented to in the past). However, the timing of this post is purely coincidental. It’s a Friday and I’ve not heard back for almost a week now from NOW: Pensions.

As a reminder, the company kept making contradictory promises (i.e. lies) or breaking promises, not honouring their own contracts, etc.

Here’s the full chain of correspondence with few redactions (names of their workers, including managers):

> Roy Schestowitz wrote on 08/04/2023 04:32:
>> Complaints now pensions support wrote on 05/04/2023 15:03:
>>> I hope this helps to settle your concerns regarding your NOW Pension
>>> fund, as you can see from the above, they have outlined how and who
>>> is responsible for protecting your pension savings and applies to all
>>> NOW Pensions members.
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Please send the full letter, as promised, to
>> 1) my wife
>> 2) myself
>>
>> as promised by ????
>> as promised by ????
>> as promised by ?????
>>
>> several times since February. We need this obligation in writing.
>
> I need an update on this. There are multiple complainants about the
> pension fraud. We need action, not stalling tactics. You behave like
> lawyers, not like a pension provider.
If you do not reply by the end of today (Friday), prepare the cheque for my wife and I to pick up next week at your office.

We are withdrawing all the money. You are a reckless, lying, untrustworthy company. You not only lied to me (3 different people, including managers) you also failed to reply to very simple E-mails about a dozen times.

Meanwhile the police and Action Fraud will be getting involved.

Well, it’s 5PM now on a Friday. They failed to respond. They saw my message. They just keep stalling and stalling. It’s the usual (for over 3 months already).

If this is the state of pensions in the UK (providers refusing to deal with open complaints and not responding to E-mails for weeks), then we need to talk about this. To make matters worse, as we shall show later today in a video, even when pension fraud occurs the pension providers care about nothing except how to avoid getting sued. Nothing else matters to them. They don’t even seem to mind the fraud so much; they profit from it by facilitating that.

Pensions were meant to actually protect the pots of money (capital), not to protect people who abuse pensions. Has the business model changed? If so, when?

In a sense, pension providers nowadays seem to be a lot like HR, i.e. they work only for employers, not for employees. They sometimes help employers plunder the oppressed employees. On that of that, they shield the employers by obstructing questions about the schemes, giving false assurances or simply ignoring/disregarding/closing complaints.

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’, or the company robbing me and my colleagues behind our backs, started the fraud weeks or months after the company’s accountant had suddenly left (though maybe it predates this); instead a bunch of fraudsters took over, engaging in embezzlement that wasn’t confirmed to us until this year (and only after long and persistent pursuits, as Standard Life was stalling and stonewalling for 3 months)

MY articles from December already quite extensively covered the dodgy accounting at Sirius. I’ve heard references to such conduct (“sophisticated” or “smooth” criminals), coming from people who were long involved in the company. This is a company that pretends its address is in fact the address of an accountant or accounting firm. The CEO who fled the company (scene of the crime) last month had done the same with his own company. These aren’t people of integrity, they’re immoral imposters who barely ever use Free software (they (mis)use the brand “Open Source” mostly for marketing and recruitment).

As noted here back in December, the company had been violating the law for years by not sending payslips, rarely sending them, or only sending some after a lot of nagging/reminders.

Who was doing the accounting anyway? One theory is that the company was passing the data to some external (the above-mentioned) people to sign off, without actually auditing or verifying anything. That might explain them ‘failing’ to check that for many employees the money wasn’t at all being sent to pensions as specified in over 60 payslips (per employee). Serious ‘failure’! This went on for over half a decade. This was definitely not an accident, hence the scare quotes around the word failure.

In the E-mails below (redacted for privacy) one can see the allusion to the manager explaining the accounting, rather than actual accountants doing the accounting, dealing with accounts. The messages were sent to and by a notoriously reckless, lazy employee (with almost zero technical skills) who forgot to arrange for coverage (colleagues were left alone at night!). Many such blunders happened without her facing consequences. There were good reasons for this person being strongly loathed among many staff. There’s the lying about looking for cover, the failure to actually provide cover (for holidays), among many other failures….

If that’s not bad enough, she was also bullying staff and by the looks of it (or on the face of it) participating in pension fraud, in effect robbing the people she was bullying. If she can be proven to have been culpable in the “pensiongate” (as a Personal Assistant), she might be sentenced to prison.

Anyway, shown in bold below is the part suggesting that accounting at Sirius was done improperly by people not qualified to do so (and when mistakes were made, innocent staff paid the price).

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: September Salary
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 22:11:11 +0100
From: ????????? ?????????
To: ????????? ?????????

Hi ?????????,

I hope you are well. I have just checked the salary and it looks to me like the payroll only counts 7 shifts instead of 8 shifts for this month. Could you please check up on this when you are less busy?

Many thanks,

?????????

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: Re: September Salary
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2020 17:23:51 +0100
From: ?????????? ????????
To: ?????? ??????????????????

Hi ?????????,

Thanks for getting back to me, but this is still not clear enough to me because on the months of June and July (both months) I got 8 shifts and I was paid £850.71, whereas now (for the month of September) I was paid £784.93, so there is a huge difference. If you can send me the payslip, at least I will see deductions, so that will help.

Br,

?????????

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: Re: September Salary
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:35:02 +0100
From: ?????????? ?????????
To: ??????? ??????

Hi ????????,

Do you have the payslips available now? If possible, I would like to have the payslips from January 2020 up to date. They’re needed for legal reasons.

Regards,

Hi ?????????,

Just spoke with [CEO]. It seems you were over paid last month, so it was deducted from this month. I will arrange for your payslips to be sent to you on Monday.

Kind Regards,

????????? ?????????

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: Re: September Salary
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2020 12:25:33 +0100
From: ?????? ????????
To: ??????? ????????

Hi ???????,

Thanks for sending the payslips. I have reconciled the things which [were] not clear to me in the first place. In my understanding, I wasn’t overpaid on the month of August it [is] just that the accountant or whoever [is] doing the payroll didn’t deduct the necessary stuff that they are supposed to do (that’s their job) [and] because of “their” mistake I was penalized; If I didn’t see the payslip I wouldn’t know it. Anyway, thank you everything now is clear.

Best,

The key part above is, the reference point isn’t accountants but the CEO. If the CEO does the accounting (he is no accountant) or overlooks all this, then it is ripe for great abuse. A potential perpetrator can never be entrusted as his/her own bookkeeper.

Video download link | md5sum
Time for Sirius Management to Face Prison
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ are very serious; we’ve come to the point now where it’s more or less a countdown ahead of arrests or class action lawsuit (or both)

TODAY we published a lot of material about Sirius ‘Open Source’ and since recording the above video we’ve published a little more.

In light of what Standard Life told us last night (they sent a letter at night, which is unusual for firms that work 9 to 5), we’re now progressing the case against a company that defrauded GNU/Linux system administrators, Free software specialists, programmers and so on.

This is now a criminal matter. Several people need to be arrested.

The issue is further complicated by an NDA signed with the Gates Foundation (we don’t even know the details of it). The principal fraudster now resides in Washington, the state. To get full accountability they will likely have to issue an extradition warrant (sent from authorities in the UK to the US). This adds a number of new dimensions, including the divorce. The financial fugitive has many liabilities in the UK. Some of these issues are discussed in length in the video above.

This is what they sent me in 2011 (other Free/libre software and GNU/Linux enthusiasts were also scammed this way):

Along with 7 pages in total:

Summary: The pension fraud of Sirius ‘Open Source’ was facilitated by Standard Life; the very large pension fund, which is based in Scotland, needs to pay reparations to many victims (we cannot even tell how many; these are colleagues who are unaware of what’s going on) and the criminals need to be arrested (the fugitive in the United States needs to be extradited to face justice for his crimes)

Some new numbers this morning^*.

2019^***: 10,402 deaths
2014-19 average^***: 10,456 deaths
2022^**: 10,747 deaths
2023^**: 12,052 deaths

(12052-10402)/10402*100=15.86.

_____
^* As per 9:40 AM (earlier than 10, the usual time). Was supposed to be out on Tuesday, but this time it got delayed till 13 April 2023 (due to Easter/Bank Holiday).

^** From ONS (above).

^*** From ONS (historic)

In their own words (lies or contradictions included):

Summary: After almost 40 days Standard Life finally gets back (in writing) to victims of the fraud at Sirius ‘Open Source’; the response is designed to help Standard Life “wash its hands” without actually tackling fraud committed in its name (and with documents produced by Standard Life, not forged)

HOURS after I prodded Standard Life by E-mail they finally got back to me (and others) with something more concrete. As expected, they did nothing to actually solve the problem and in the process they resorted to lying to us about the dates.

“I got response from standard life,” one former colleague told me.

“They have stated I can confirm Standard Life has administered a pension scheme for Sirius Corporation Plc from July 2009 until December 2012. Unfortunately, there is no record of you joining the scheme during that time and it would not have been possible to join after the Scheme closed in 2012.”

Notice the above. They just used templates. They barely investigated anything on an individual basis, yet in their PDF they made it seem like it was tailored to the recipient, including individual passwords. All they changed was the name of the person and maybe the case number.

My former colleague noticed a glaring anomaly in their narrative/story. “This seems to be slightly different to what you have been told,” the former colleague said, “as I think you said it was moved in 2018.”

“2016″ was said repeatedly to me by the manager, on several occasions. So either the above letter contains a lie or the managers lied to me repeatedly over the telephone.

Here is the message I received:

Dear Dr Schestowitz

I’ve completed my investigation of your concerns since I last contacted you on 29 March 2023. Thank you for your patience.

I’ve attached a letter which outlines our position [...]

If you have any questions, or you are having a problem accessing the letter, please let me know.

Yours sincerely

???????? ??????????????

Customer Relations

slcomplaints@standardlife.com

The name is in the image, but we don’t want that in text.

This is more like a cover-up, not an investigation. Did it take them almost 40 days to just run a search through a database? Really!?

Did they bother contacting authorities? Did they contact Sirius?

They sent the same thing to other victims in order to cover things up, talking like a lawyers’ department, looking to cover their own behind while solving nothing at all. If this is how pensions are managed in the UK (this is a very large provider), then we’re in serious trouble.

Notice that they are not saying there’s no crime, they just resort to the equivalent of “try another department” or “none of our business!”

As a reminder, I still have papers from Standard Life with my full name, date of birth, and account/scheme code/numbers on them. I still have countless payslips showing pension contributions were made. Standard Life cannot simply claim to have nothing to do with it; Standard Life basically legitimised a fraud. The perpetrators are still not held accountable. Two of them are in the UK and one is a fugitive in the United States, residing not far from Bill Gates, whom he took money from under an NDA.

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ help highlight abuse by pension providers; after more than 3 months they’re still not holding accountable pension fraudsters (at least 3 people were involved in the fraud and two of them are based in the UK, so extradition proceedings aren’t even required)

Latest (today):

>> I hope this helps to settle your concerns regarding your
>> NOW Pension fund, as you can see from the above, they
>> have outlined how and who is responsible for protecting
>> your pension savings and applies to all NOW Pensions members.
>
> Hi,
>
> Please send the full letter, as promised, to
> 1) my wife
> 2) myself
>
> as promised by ???????? (staff)
> as promised by ???????? (staff)
> as promised by ???????? (manager)
>
> several times since February. We need this obligation in
> writing.

I need an update on this. There are multiple complainants about the pension fraud. We need action, not stalling tactics. You behave like lawyers, not like a pension provider.