Video download link | md5sum 123a41526a6d53bb9f2378df84318c7c
Envisioning Bankruptcy
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The story of last summer at Sirius (it started in late spring) is told now in retrospect, based on about 5 hours of recordings (3 meetings); it didn’t work out as the managers had hoped/planned and instead the company’s last chief is now doing double-shifts (16 hours in a row!), basically trying to make up for extreme understaffing amidst a clients exodus; the CEO left last month as well, so he seems to have become unemployed after sinking the ship he rode on

MY final year at Sirius ‘Open Source’ was last year and it was already getting pretty awful. There was lying, deceit, and cover-up. Managers were pretty much predicting doom (without saying it out loud) and they had already silently robbed past staff.

The video above has a period of long silence in it because, for the first time, I forgot to unmute myself after playing back what a manager said last summer (90 minutes after the start of this recording). People can hear right from the horse’s mouth that things were getting really bad, no matter how much lipstick was put on the pig. The silent bit hopefully didn’t cover anything too critical (which wasn’t repeated later, but it’ll serve as a lesson for future videos regardless).

‘Fantasies’ of Sirius became more commonplace, and this wasn’t limited to just discussing “re-infrastructuring” and other ‘big words’. After taking notes or listening to suggestions from staff they eventually did what they planned all along. In other words, nothing has been implemented since then that wasn’t premeditated. Previous suggestions were rejected… despite never-ending options put forth by staff.

It’s regretful that I lost part of what I said due to the muting lasting too long; this is probably the first time I lost audio since last summer when we recorded about Belarus/EPO (a bad mouse button was to blame back then).

Anyway, as a side note I recall how one of the romantic partners of a manager (he has several) kept suggesting that we should lower the already-low salaries of people who work all night long and are highly qualified, have high seniority or have long served the company during a year of massive inflation (about 10% in the UK!) while leaving in tact the salary of her girlfriend, who covers daytime. This person does not seem to have any understanding of the law; when people work overnight the salary must be a lot higher than in daytime/Office Hours. Sometimes it’s better to be quiet than to say out loud something foolish if not illegal.

But that’s not “the” crime; it’s just a side issue for a company that became “petty thief” (very big thief).

This is the last part of this mini-series. We hope it has helped explain what happened last year without naming any people or revealing any clients.

Video download link | md5sum e6d79ef1efc46c2747184e07504811b1
Sirius Plans That Never Materialised
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The gross mismanagement of Sirius ‘Open Source’ is a longstanding issue; it goes back to 2019 and it culminated in growing levels of deceit, set aside fraud aspects, so today we take a look back at another meeting from 2022

LISTENING to audio from almost a year ago (we have about 5 hours of audio from last summer; this was shared with staff), it now seems clear that Sirius ‘Open Source’ had a lot of fantasies while drifting further and further away from… well, ‘Open Source’.

In the start of summer (2022-06-01) we had a second meeting (out of 3 in total) about the future of the company and studying it in retrospect it’s easy to understand [crer 168114 witch-hunts], scare tactics etc. Colleagues were subjected to threats and were isolated from their peers. They deemed this approach “evil” (direct quote).

Much of the ‘meat’ of the meeting starts a long time after the start with staff that’s actually technical (and actually doing all the work, even 24/7) raising questions while the others repeat the same talking points. Basically, managers (which at that point where like half of all the staff) were discussing many options and presenting each. They collected suggestions from staff and eventually threw all of them out. Staff was a bit surprised that after these consultations every suggestion from the staff was rejected. Every single one of them!

One of the self-appointed managers (no relevant skills whatsoever) was discussing the scoring criteria — e.g. what will be assessed in appraisals. She was only reading the script/presentation. It’s highly probable she was fully aware of the pension fraud and she may have directly participated in that. An opportunistic career-climbing narcissist. The discussion continued about criteria e.g. sick leave (my wife and I never took even one day off for illness/feeling unwell) and one colleague was so uncomfortable about the meeting that he left his microphone on mute and turned off the camera for the entire meeting.

As noted in the video above, the company lied about a lot of things, including new roles, hiring in the US, new clients in the US and so on.

Video download link | md5sum 8ce515754e59d043a723d0590817c9ce
Sirius Situation
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The second part of Sirius ‘Open Source’ Fantasy (an ongoing series; there are two series about Sirius running in conjunction at the moment) deals with what happened 11.5 months ago; the above video is a longer version of the text below

ABOUT a year ago, some time in April, Sirius privately admitted it was having issues. It was trying to spin those as a strength. The person who likely participated in defrauding staff (she saw those fake payslips for years) sent a misleading message. It was soon followed by a misleading online “meeting”.

The above video does not play back any of that “meeting”, but it is summarised by noting that the company was planning to move to the US… (that never happened!)

Staff raised concerns about a number of different issues. The talking went on and on for nearly 2 hours, nothing is interesting enough to single out, but what we have discussed about the meeting since then was likely summarised here back in December and January. We’ll try to avoid repetition. Some of the later parts will be more interesting.

Series parts:

1. YOU ARE HERE ? In 2022 the Company Was Already Too Deep in Debt

Video download link | md5sum 5955a4f5328798df162f089486615507
Sirius in 2022
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: A look back at what happened in Sirius ‘Open Source’ last year

THE last year of Sirius (CEO left already) is easy to recall in light of an old recording of a 2-hour meeting. After the company had secretly plundered its own staff it was desperately chasing clients while abusing and underpaying staff, as we explained before.

In the name of “cost savings” (nope!) it adopted “clown computing” and then it let go of a physical office. It was changing servers by getting rid of its own. Everything it had left was a virtual asset… there were no physical assets left. Such facts have been mentioned since, even in the meeting, which brought up potential clients. It’s worth noting that these clients never became actual clients of Sirius and the company was trying to rebrand or reinvent itself as SiriUS (it was pronounced Sir… US).

The manager who left last month was basically reporting to staff, showing his graph presentation while talking about sales, engineering, infrastructure, outsourcing, support, projects etc. Of course it all become a complete disaster. Almost an hour in he was summarising the re-infrastructuring process — something that never happened.

I first considered leaving the company in 2019 (after the likely illegal contract-signing, then the NDA and the bullying), but last year I was already sure I’d leave. That the company secretly plundered members of staff is something that wasn’t confirmed until this year. Now we work towards accountability (prosecution).

Series parts:

1. YOU ARE HERE ? Sirius Crimes Reported to British Authorities, Formally Registered With References (Many Victims), Here’s What It Means and What Happens Next

Summary: Sirius is a good case study, especially for longtime insiders; Techrights investigates what it takes to deal with white-collar crime, starting with evidence-gathering to investigation and prosecution (maybe we’ll have some mugshots to share at the end)

PENSION fraud seems rather common in the UK. Companies like pension providers profit from it. It seems to be happening routinely. So much so that it is a special category with loads of options. How many people in the UK report pension fraud each year? Probably a lot.

The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ go beyond pension fraud, but we’ll focus on pensions here. Sirius isn’t so unique in this regard, but there are points to note. The CEO escaped the company last month, but people below processed the payslips with fake claims of pension payments adding up. These payslips were basically lies. The company, Sirius, offered us a pension that did not exist. This was done not just to me but also to my colleagues; there are similar letters sent to them too, with accompanying payslips to demonstrate the glaring anomaly.

For over 5 years the company deducted money, for “pension” (arranged by Sirius, with alleged contributions of its own), but the money was not given to the pension provider, as formally confirmed by the pension provider itself (final response issued and challenged a week ago).

The company kept deducting for “pensions”, for another about 4 years, after it no longer even had any records with the pension provider (see letter).

The company refused to talk about this, even when inquiries came from former staff a long time ago. Now the company is in hiding, without a physical office. The company’s CEO abruptly left last month (when all this was exposed and verified by the pension provider).

There are at least 3 people who participated in this embezzlement. It must be acted upon urgently as they may be hiding money and tampering with evidence.

As we noted a day ago, there’s an upcoming series about the deception as the company may have engaged in debt/tax dodge/bankruptcy. All those pertinent shells of the company can be connected to a secret deal with Bill Gates, signed with an NDA in 2019. They basically use a legal contract to hide potentially illegal deals. NDAs are legally dubious, especially where the D refers to disparagement rather than disclosure.

I’ve had a lot of time to speak to other victims of this. “Mine is pretty much the same,” one of them said regarding the trail of documents. “So it looks like basically nothing ever got paid in to the Standard Life scheme and our contributions were never made from the start, they were just kept instead. I think the only way to get anything back would be to sue Sirius and/or wait for the police to investigate.”

The police is already investigating. “I have most of my payslips so I can prove I was making contributions,” said a former colleague, “have you already provided similar to the police?”

Well, the police will find out there are too many victims to ignore.

If you phone the police, as I have a few months ago, you quickly realise they don’t want to deal with such crime and instead ask you to report to Action Fraud. It won’t be cheap. It is based in the City of London and would likely progress very slowly as it’s not “strategic” or “high priority” to them. However, now that we have a lot more letters and many victims they cannot simply brush this aside. I’ve got more than just the payslips with me. With cooperation at Standard Life perhaps they can get a detailed list of all the victims and manage to get in touch with all of them.

So what happens next? Stay tuned for Part II.

Summary: The seriously rogue company, Sirius Open Source (it is not Open Source), has run out of time; with the doors closing and with evidence-gathering concluding, it’s time to face the music

MY earlier post hinted that this coming week, starting this weekend, we shall escalate a little, starting with a mini series about crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’. These crimes started the very year I joined (2011), based on hard, verifiable (and already-verified) evidence. In parallel, special law-enforcing authorities in the UK shall be getting involved. Such involvement is imperative. The crime was committed by more than one person and several culprits are based in the United Kingdom.

As the title suggests, as before, none of the enablers and beneficiaries would speak about this. Their consistent approach boils down to hide, keep quiet, pretend not to exist. At this stage there is no other choice but to proceed with prosecution and arrest. Litigation isn’t necessary, just as you’d not sue a thief who broke into your house; you phone the police and report the crime. We’ve already gathered the evidence for almost everything. It just took time, but it spares cops the typical excuses/stalling. The Pension Regulator isn’t a cop; hence, it doesn’t deal with crimes.

As noted several days ago, we got formal (written) letters confirming our allegations. We no longer explore draining out NOW: Pensions (bank details for withdrawal or cheque for us to pick up with paperwork signed) because after months of insistent reminders the company finally did the right thing and followed that up days later. It’s just a blunder and a scandal that it took so long and involved them lying about half a dozen times (managers also). How many people out there, outside Sirius, are similarly scammed but aren’t aware of it. Probably a lot.

Sirius management does not wish to talk about it. When the special crime units phone them all up they will be forced to talk. Those who will face or accept unpleasant consequences did it to themselves. And they did that at great expense to other, innocent, unknowing people (this was covered by several external entities, including Standard Life).

Plunder on behalf of Sirius is “Planning for tomorrow”? Using the name of Standard Life and fake/false payslips?

Summary: The facilitator of a scam was contacted the other day (Integrity Financial Management Ltd.); their staff too seems to have played a role in the pension fraud, so we’ve contacted Integrity Financial Management directly, however it chose not to respond and instead pretended not to be aware of anything — a major blunder and an actual crime against GNU/Linux administrators and programmers

INITIAL CONTACT was made the other day with Integrity Financial Management Ltd. That firm may have facilitated the crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ and it needs to know about it. We have the names of the people who managed these accounts.

You may not be aware of this, but your firm facilitated fraud at Standard Life

http://techrights.org/2023/04/17/fraud-at-sirius-open-source-with-integrity-financial-management/

Myself and former colleagues are still trying to hold accountable the culprits

http://techrights.org/wiki/Crimes_of_Sirius_Open_Source#Fraud_Investigation

Why did you issue all this material to us? Why did you facilitate theft of pension funds?

Please contact us as soon as possible to clarify the matter.

Just because they’re not replying does not mean they’re off the hook. This is a typical business strategy; they try to ignore anything that’s not convenient to them, hoping it would miraculously go away.

As we also noted earlier this week, Sirius had engaged in financial fraud and it is now registered at the address of the accountant, so that’s another potential legal liability for them.

So far I’ve spent about 10 hours on the phone all in all. And even when each time you phone you know exactly what needs to be achieved and try to get to that as fast as possible, they delay and obstruct. It’s an actual method, tiring down the complainant or bleeding people to death with phone bills (like legal bills/lawyer fees as barrier). It’s a bit like a network of organised crime made to over up its own doing. It is well coordinated to dodge accountability. Business as usual.

As an example of endless delays, consider NOW: Pensions. I contacted them back in January and it took until now (late April) to finally receive a letter of assurance that can be regarded as satisfactory.

In fact, sent just after 4PM yesterday (by E-mail):

Dear Dr Schestowitz,

NOW: Pensions Trust (“the Scheme”)

I write about your complaint. I would like to thank you for your patience while we have investigated this matter and would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

I can confirm we sent a letter (the information in the letter applies to all members in a NOW Pension Scheme) to your home address on the 12^th of April 2023. For reference I have attached the correspondence to this email.

This has been protected with a case-sensitive password. The password is your national insurance number followed by an exclamation mark. [...]

Should you consider that this does not bring the matter to a conclusion, you can request that the Trustees review the matter through the Internal Dispute Resolution Process (IDRP).

[...]

Yours sincerely

Craig Aitken

NOW: Pensions Trust Administration Team

And here is a mildly-redacted (home address) PDF of the document. We redacted a photograph of the physical thing earlier this week. Why did it take so long to issue such a letter? With NOW: Pensions alone my wife and I must have spent about 4 hours over the telephone; it costs a fortune as they don’t have a free line and they keep you waiting on the line a lot (when they don’t leave you pressing buttons and ‘speaking’ to a bot).