Saturday, June 24th, 2023, 1:19 am
One Month of Police Silence: Where is Accountability?
Filed under: Video download link | md5sum 0de07faab93ab5373d58e77a04fca707
The MP Comes Marching in
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The pension fraud at Sirius ‘Open Source’ (committed against programmers and sysadmins focused on GNU/Linux and Free software) has reached the political level; so far one can observe that politicians aren’t quite in control of the police or, contrariwise, the police enjoys immunity or exercises impunity because it simply doesn’t bother responding to politicians
A MONTH ago I turned to my Member of Parliament (MP) after the police had failed to look into fraud complaints (myself and colleagues, GNU/Linux sysadmins for the most part, were victims). My MP’s office said 4 weeks should be more than enough for police to respond, but nothing has happened, so today I disclose what happened and what will happen next (it’s far, far from over).
The video above gives a rough introduction to the issue, which is moreover explained succinctly below. When I contacted my Manchester MP a month ago I said:
Dear ????? ???????,
My name is Roy and I live in Manchester. My employer, which I resigned from in December, turned out to have engaged in embezzlement against me for over 5 years. It was pension fraud. My “pension” money was never given to a pension provider as the payslips said, and instead went into the management (black hole). Upon further inquiry this was confirmed by formal letters and I discovered they did the same to my colleagues. I reported this to Greater Manchester Police, which insisted that I file a case with Action Fraud. After 4 weeks of waiting Action Fraud made is abundantly clear that it did not even look into the case. It just turned away victims. According to media reports in reputable sources, this is quite common. I reach out to you as this is a severe political blunder at this point. I chronicled some of this in http://techrights.org/wiki/Sirius_Open_Source and http://techrights.org/wiki/Crimes_of_Sirius_Open_Source though it seems actual enforcement — something only the police can do — is needed now. Will you please bring up this matter or help me pursue justice not just for myself but also my colleagues?
Yours sincerely,
A lot of time has passed, a lot of messages were exchanged, but no progress could be made because the police is “MIA”. (Missing In Action)
Ironically, they call themselves Action Fraud. According to British broadcasters, they’re notorious for not taking action. Sure, they take reports. They have bots to respond to the reports, but what good are bots?
The ‘My “pension”‘ sentence (above) could be further elucidated. It might lead with the fact that the company withdrew money from paychecks under the pretence of contributing to the fund but never actually did so. The current wording could be made more clear. “As for turning away victims,” one person noted, “ensure that it is clear that there are many of your former colleagues in the mess as well. The closing line is quite clear, which is important.”
In the next part I’ll share some more correspondence from and to the MP. What we strive to show now is that there’s no system of accountability or, if such a system does exist, it’s clearly not functioning. It fails victims and rewards criminals.
June 25th, 2023 at 7:37 am
I’m going to make a prediction: you’re not going to get anywhere with this process.
It sounds like you have genuine claims. But they’re interspersed with huge amounts of ranting and conspiracies, such that few are likely to consider you serious. You immediately turn on any institution that does not offer instant help. You’re making significant accusations without much evidence, and also making claims (eg falsely registered “she’ll companies”) that are just plain incorrect on their face, demonstrating you don’t understand the issues.
Be interesting to hear who’s willing to hire you after all this.