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”.

Wanna get your money? Over your dead body!

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”).

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.

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.

From Rianne’s departure message about Sirius ‘Open Source’

Summary: Sirius is finished, but it’s important to share the lessons learned with other people; there might be other “pretenders” out there and they need to be abandoned

THIS is by no means a complete summary; the Sirius ‘Open Source’ wiki contains a more complete overview. However, this is an abbreviated summary focusing on the issues at hand, rewriting them for an audience that might think about leaving a toxic employer but isn’t sure why or how. Some readers have asked for such a summary as they consider doing the same.

We’ve decided to use the existing articles’ index to make this grand summary of the issues, split suitably for quicker digestion (covering unions, staff health etc.) and omitting more employer-specific scandals, e.g. illegal contract-signing (we included a response to my initial refusal/declination and others’), E-mail clippings as evidence and so on.

The short story is: do not participate in lying and in illegal acts. If you feel like your employer is heading in this direction, prepare to leave.

Don’t wait too long. Do not attempt to rationalise staying. Your morality is more important than short-term conveniences like “paying the mortgage” or “staying with colleagues”.

I joined Sirius 12 years ago (in February of 2011). The CEO was kind to me at the time. We’ve shared a screenshot from the Internet Archive of the company’s old site (back when it was a sponsor of the Free Software Foundation). The CEO, as I found out much later, was hopping from one woman to the next, saddling them with daughters whom he failed to take care of. He was getting married when I spoke about joining, marrying a manager in the company — a manager whom he had already had a child with. It was maybe too late for me to properly understand the chronology of it, but it seemed benign at the time. It smacked of nepotism already, but at least the spouse had actual experience as a manager. Similarly, my wife had a degree in Computer Science. The CEO, as I recently found out, was also allegedly cheating on his second wife. We’re still investigating the nature of that as it impacts the company directly. The CEO is not a good person. I was warned about him being a chronic liar some time around 2006, but I did not fully heed this warning.

The company was in disarray in (or by) 2022. Heck, it was standing on one foot for several years already (maybe since 2019). In 2021 they sent me a bogus message about “disciplinary note”, simply because I’d not say “hi, it’s Roy” or something inane like this over the phone. The management failed to prepare staff and then tried to blame the staff, which was assigned to handle clerical work using a truly defective product with impossible demands (answering within 3 rings).

My ‘tenure’ at the company was generally good; nobody complained and I was “Star of the Week” (10-pound voucher award) about a decade ago. I also have some other physical certificates that they sent me in recognition (e.g. laminated finish on paper for my 5-year anniversary).

So what compelled me to leave?

A lot of things.

Above all, the ethics associated with the job became far too problematic. I wrote about this in my blog last summer and again when I left this past December. Some clients were truly awful and immoral. I don’t want to name them, and thankfully I’ve avoided working with/for them. By this point Sirius kept announcing clients that later turned out to ‘pre’ announcements (or truly premature as nothing ever came out of it). The managers were desperate to give a false impression (illusion) of getting business and some of the actual “business” they attracted is worse than nothing. Some past clients did not wish to associate with Sirius and at least one past client (telephony sector company) asked to be removed from the fake “clients” page of Sirius.

I can’t blame those clients. Being associated with Sirius was becoming a liability to them. Search for ‘The Liar’ in the headlines here; you’ll see what I mean… don’t tolerate any bosses who keep saying they’re too busy to reply to E-mail from staff; so what are they doing all day? If they don’t even respond to staff, then it’s not clear if they’re busy at all; they could just as well pretend to be “busy” by not doing anything at all, then use that as an excuse or “evidence” of the busy-ness.

The Liar (nickname) later resorted to using flimsy ‘evidence’. He said, without any evidence, that I had uttered something “defamatory”; it took two weeks to actually show something and what they then showed was some side IRC channel (that nobody reads) stating perfectly factual information about my experiences, without naming people or any company. It was a chat between just two people and didn’t reveal anyone’s identity. It was factual and necessary; it was moral to object to bad ideas. Blind obedience and unquestionable docility should not be seen as a merit.

The company was, at this point, not even an attractive employer. Set aside the ethical deficit. It had no actual office (Sirius used to host for clients, not outsource for them) and had some technical workers compared to “monkeys” (even treated as such). In recent years it became trivial to show, using documents in the public domain, that the company was operating like a shell. It was simple to show it’s getting worse over time and unbearable debt was growing. The company was going to go under (just a matter of time) and the staff had no prospects of progression (well, no chance at progression except through nepotism (like family) or sex); the company was no longer “open source”, except in name, bragging about ISO certification (see The Inside Story of ISO ‘Certification’ Mill) while gaslighting people who actually value security/compliance.

If you work in a company such as this, don’t expect it to improve. The people with greater skills and integrity likely left already. They won’t be coming back.

Not only did the company ignore the warnings from me (about security problems), it didn’t even change passwords, alter providers, or self-host an actual “Open Source” alternative that doesn’t lie about security breaches. Sirius kept paying huge bills for “clown computing” (instances that were idle almost all the time) and my suggestion of self-hosting, like we did before, were dismissed as “hobbyist” by the CEO. So what is to be sold as a service? Outsourcing?

For more information about these things, revisit the parts about “How Carbon Accounting Became a Cover for Sirius Open Source Ltd.” and “How Sirius Open Source Ltd. Felt Deep Into Debt” (super dodgy).

By the time we left (in 2022) the company was quite frankly broke and not worth suing for severance. It had likely plundered some older pensions already (still the subject of an ongoing probe; photographs of letters from the current pension provider suggest they might try this again). This became a cultural, chronic problem. For instance, the management lied about providing recordings of meetings in 2019, so I started making my own recordings of such meetings. I could not trust managers’ words. Such chronic lying and false promises are a sign it’s time to leave (or prepare to leave). I already prepared in 2019, but then COVID-19 happened. The managers like to tell themselves they did us a favour. But people who are idle a lot of the time because they work overnight, devoted to complex tasks of monitoring many things and responding, can never sleep well. This impacts their physical and mental health. They make personal compromises while getting paid laughably little. For projects to be done (e.g. programming) one needs a proper daytime job without distraction and with decent pay.

Sirius Open Wash Ltd. (maybe a suggested name for another — likely third — shell entity) would be letting Windows users who adore surveillance get involved in decision-making, grabbing Gates Foundation money to pretend they have a future (Gates never needed a British company to handle something thousands of American firms can easily handle). Seeing that the CEO’s and the company’s Twitter accounts (all of them) have not tweeted anything since last summer, we suppose no other shell will be created. Sirius is finished. Jobs were advertised by the company’s account in Twitter last year, but only on short-term contractual basis. It now says the company is also US-based and says laughable things like Sirius being American leaders in the area (Sirius has almost no clients and staff there), simply because the chief absconded, escaping responsibilities for his family which he ditched (so he can have sex with another woman, apparently some American he met).

So he’s likely running away to dodge litigation and maybe dodge payments to the two former wives and 4 daughters, especially the young ones (early teens at this time).

This series has attempted to be impersonal (no names), but at some point it can get trickier. We still try to work around the secrecy of the NDA and figure out what exactly happened in 2019.

Video download link | md5sum b8720fc3b41aaa603c06b9b81ba9921c
Sirius Closure and Steps Ahead
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Yesterday I was sent a letter approving my resignation from Sirius ‘Open Source’, two months after I had already announced that I was resigning with immediate effect; they sent an identical letter to my wife (this time, unlike before, they remembered to also change the names!!)

THIS is just an update regarding Sirius, as it sent the following yesterday; it was sent one day after the actual date of the letter (“Acceptance of your Resignation [...] Please see the attached letter.”) and to quote:

Re: Your resignation has been accepted

Dear Roy,

I write further to my letter of 9th Dec 2022 in which I asked you to reconsider your resignation and gave you a cooling off period to 16th Dec 2022. Given that I did not hear from you before the end of the cooling off period, I could only therefore assume that you did not wish to retract your resignation.

I am disappointed that you decided not to allow us the opportunity to attempt to resolve any concerns that led to your resignation, however I have to respect your decision and it is therefore with regret that your resignation was accepted, with your final day of employment being Friday 16th December.

Any accrued holidays you ha not taken will be paid in your final pay, which should have been processed in the January payment run. Your P45 will be issued as soon as possible after your final pay has been administered.

We wish you every success in the future.
Yours sincerely,

xxxxxx
CEO, Sirius UK

As I explain in the video above, it seems like a face-saving publicity stunt from them, pretending all was amicable. We’re meanwhile investigating what happened to the pensions of all past staff; the Standard Life management is being super-evasive about it. One might assume it got plundered by Sirius management, but we’re still trying to find verifiable evidence of that. Now that British and French workers are staging massive strikes (the latter over pensions in particular) we urge people all around the world to check that their pensions haven’t been rendered scams. It seems like a trend.

Video download link | md5sum 46726a937016a1d3c37cb00ecce28246
End of Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ series ended after 60 days (parts published every day except the day my SSD died completely and very suddenly); the video above explains what’s to come and what lessons can be learned from the 21-year collective experience (my wife and I; work periods combined) in a company that still claims, in vain, to be “Open Source”

THIS is going to be the last video about Sirius, at least for a while. We’ll get back to this subject, but only infrequently. We plan to publish a list of things that are applicable to every worker in the technology sector, especially companies that are openwashing (and let’s face it, as of recent years almost every technical company merely claims to support “Open Source” while doing almost everything secretly and keeping the crown jewels proprietary, sometimes patented too).

I can finally devote 100% of my technical capacity to Free software, either developing some or writing about it, as I’ve already done for more than 20 years (my personal site turned 20 last year).

At the moment society faces a number of threats and growing disruption, magnified further by an ever-escalating global (but proxy) war, which in turn impacts all sorts of other things (access to food, price of energy, mental health and so on). Things will be further exacerbated later this year, based on gloomy but seemingly realistic predictions (the forecasts of a recovery aren’t based on actual observable facts, only wishful thinking).

More and more people seem to be choosing to “disconnect”; if not from society then from “tech” (stuff like social control media, which was never meant to make people happy, except temporarily — that’s just what addiction does). Many people whom we used to revere and look up to have vanished. Many sites went offline (the Web is generally shrinking, based on Netcraft). Financial strain would accelerate these trends.

The rest of what I have to say will be covered in the next video. We’ll try to produce more articles with more videos.