Summary: Today we conclude this week’s series, which explained how Sirius isn’t just funded by the British government but is also protected by the British government; HMRC is not responding to fraud reports (sent exactly 4 weeks ago) and Action Fraud, overseen by a client of Sirius (since 2013), does not seem to have even opened the Pension Fraud complaint (it sent a template response after exactly 4 weeks^*)

WHEN we finally reach Tuesday or Wednesday (next week) it will be 4 weeks since my Member of Parliament contacted Action Fraud regarding the pension fraud complaint that Action Fraud is ignoring. Action Fraud has still not bothered responding to her. I’m not the sole victim of this fraud. Former colleagues were robbed as well (a lot of money was covertly stolen). For the time being we’re closing this series and will post another further update/s anew. This isn’t the end. This is only the beginning of a rather broad political scandal. Can one trust a government to regulate itself or its contractors? Can one complain to a government about abuse against its own workers? This in many ways resembles the EPO scandals. The EPO even invented its own Ombuds office or “EPO’s Ombuds service”, created and controlled by those who spent over a decade committing crimes at the EPO. Such “Ombuds” is farcical; it’s an exercise in optics (giving people out there the mere illusion of accountability).

Gaslighting and/or self-induced defeatism (learned helplessness) is a potent weapon leveraged against the impatient and unmotivated. We’re neither impatient nor unmotivated, so this will carry on and on until a resolution is found and the perpetrators of the crime are arrested.
_____
^* Out of business hours on a weekend. It seems safe to assume no actual person sent that.

Summary: Contractors may seem glowingly popular at the Linux Foundation; but what does contracting mean for corporate liability?

WHEN this series started 6 months ago we promised not to name clients, even though most of them are listed and shown publicly in the company’s official Web site.

Seeing that the British authorities (or “Crown”) are unwilling to hold Sirius accountable for pension fraud, we thought it would be worth showing what’s already public anyway. Here are some government clients of Sirius:

All the above is public anyway. And I’ve blurred out anything that’s not a public institution. Another page:

There are many more that the company does not publicly name, including Parliamentary Ombudsman, Home Office, and more recently Acas (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service). There are several more that are named, e.g. Bristol City Council. Some are omitted from the carousel, but appear in another page because almost nobody is left in the company who knows how to properly maintain its Drupal Web site e.g. myself or the Support Manager. Everyone is rapidly leaving and the replacement rate is near 0-to-1.

If we are going to expose our regime too, seeing that it does not want to look into very obvious evidence of fraud, it helps to provide evidence of the company’s ties to the government. It is very much possible that later this month it will implicate London’s municipality because it’s directly connected to the cops who aren’t investigating the matter and won’t even look into reports of crime. We don’t think it’s a coincidence. They probably just don’t that would be fun! Do they really want to participate in a blunder that embarrasses their sponsor? It’s not just any municipality; I worked on their systems for ages and I also have lots to prove just how much I worked for them while my boss defrauded me and my colleagues.

Stay tuned. We have lots left to show. Sans a D-Notice, maybe this will even hit the mainstream media.

“Hi, I have read your blog on Sirius. Do you have any time to discuss further?”

–Anonymised message, earlier this month

Video download link | md5sum cd10c506a34bdc112395c0e2c16921ce
HMRC a Money Sink
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: What we’ve been demonstrating or highlighting so far this year is a defunct system of accountability, wherein the government officials and their associates are essentially above the law; can they endure the negative press that entails?

AS noted earlier in a meme, it’s now 3 weeks since reporting to HMRC that Sirius ‘Open Source’ lied in its tax filings when it issued false payslips. It told staff that pension payments had been made (every month for more than half a decade), but no money was paid. The company’s managers basically stole the money. It’s a crime, it’s embezzlement, and punishment for this crime is severe (there are many crimes committed all at the same time).

As the above video notes, seeing that HMRC doesn’t seem to care (probably too busy scrutinising the accounts of activists or political ‘enemies’), we’re progressing and moving onwards to additional steps. Many points of escalation remain. Thus far, the experience has been boding ill/poorly for the system of justice and enforcement in the UK. It’s like some kind of Kafka novel, wherein one turns from place to place like a ping-pong ball. Somehow some people are pretty much “above the law”. What might this do to public confidence in the “checks and balances”… or in slogans we’re shown on TV and radio (mass broadcast) about no escaping the wrath of the Rule of Law? We’ve written for nearly a decade about immunity and impunity in the EPO and now I (along with former colleagues) witness the same in the United Kingdom, a country where a “prince” can sleep with underage girls and then pay our tax money to “settle” and avoid extradition/arrest. The only person arrested over it was a protester who had ‘heckled’ him at his mom’s funeral.

It’s like writing to zombie agencies that exist only on paper or selectively enforce (based on special interests)

Summary: One week ago we reported tax abuses of Sirius ‘Open Source’ to HMRC; we still wait for any actual signs that HMRC is doing anything at all about the matter (Sirius has British government clients, so maybe they’d rather not look into that, in which case HMRC might be reported to the Ombudsman for malpractice)

Fraud investigations in the era of bankers going rogue

Summary: Based on our experiences and findings, one simply cannot rely on pension providers to take fraud seriously (we’ve been working as a group on this); all they want is the money and risk does not seem to bother them, even when there’s an actual crime associated with pension-related activities

THIS site isn’t a personal site (unlike my personal blog and personal site, schestowitz.com), but the issue seems commonplace and it impacts workers in “tech” (in my case, my former employer was an early sponsor of the Free Software Foundation).

I wanted to just post a quick update to say that 2 days ago I contacted two pension providers regarding their ongoing investigations of actual fraud. I wrote to them:

Is there any concrete progress on this yet?

This back-and-forth inquiry with your staff has gone on since January.

We’re fast approaching April and former Sirius staff does not want to be left aside as “April’s fools”.

The company is rapidly losing clients and may soon have key evidence in its shredders. Please progress this ASAP, even if there are not many of us and Sirius is not a large company.

We need action, not merely acknowledgements.

45 hours have passed and not even a reply from them!

One of the pension providers has not yet delivered what it promised it would send. The other has been mostly sitting on it for 3 weeks already. So what’s going on? Is this how Britain’s pension industry deals with fraud?

Sirius, the company, is ‘in hiding’ and it is losing customers (we kept noting escalation would follow for failure to provide a real address; it seems possible they not only squandered many people’s pensions but went even further). How long will it take for pension providers to take action? Will they wait until the company goes bankrupt? It might be too late by then. At a later stage we’ll explain why such delays can implicate the pension providers, making them partly accountable/complicit.

Sirius wasn’t always this rogue. Those pension providers too used to be more trustworthy, even putting their logos on athletes’ uniform to earn some trust (as if football is a badge of integrity). At one point Sirius had its logo on the jerseys of a young people’s football team (photo above), but that was a very long time ago. Nowadays it seems like the CEO of Sirius can barely even afford a shirt. Last time he held a company meeting he was wearing a rib shirt. No kidding.

Meeting the current and 124^th Lord Mayor of Manchester, Donna Ludford, yesterday morning.

By Mike Reyher – Architel Operations Center, CC BY 2.0

Summary: Network operations centre (NOC) staff at Sirius ‘Open Source’ was subjected to intense abuse after Bill Gates had passed a bribe (even a double bribe, as we’ll explain later) and today we give another example of this

AS readers of this series are probably aware, NOC staff has always worked from home. Myself and my wife never took a day off for sickness (for 21 years), but some colleagues did. Some colleagues even worked when there were still ill. Did the management appreciate it? Not really…

Shown below is how one NOC colleague was treated a couple of months or so after the Gates Foundation gave the CEO money, though only after an NDA had mysteriously been signed (more on that in the upcoming video). This was the time the NOC staff was routinely being bullied, falsely accused etc. As if the company was hoping to scuttle the whole thing, or perhaps the unqualified managers were on an ego/power trip.

This is going back to September 30 2019, i.e. when Richard Stallman was under fire right after there was a Bill Gates/Jeffrey Epstein scandal at MIT (the media shifted focus away from that). It was also around the time Melinda Gates was pursuing a divorce, knowing about these scandals. Here is a message from the colleague:

Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2019 08:27:58 +0100
From: xxxx

I was ill last Monday on my shift and couldn’t find them after a cursory look

On 29-09-2019 13:17, xxxx wrote:
> If both keys were there, why the delay?
>
> xxxx.
>
>> On 29 Sep 2019, at 12:45, xxxx wrote:
>>
>> xxxx’s key is in puppet for xxxx and Sirius, or can be grabbed from any xxxx or sirius machine where it has been pushed.
>>
>> As was/is xxxx’s.
>>
>> In short, you’ve had both all along.
>>
>>
>>> On 28/09/2019 03:34, xxxx wrote:
>>> We’ve now got xxxx’s key so should be done by Monday.
>>>
>>>> On 27-09-2019 09:37, xxxx wrote:
>>>> Ok.
>>>>
>>>> Back to support. Please resolve this as soon as.
>>>>
>>>> Please use your investigative skills and complete this task. Read what
>>>> xxxx has written in previous email.
>>>>
>>>> It is ridiculous that xxxx and xxxx have to wait for 3 months to
>>>> get these access sorted out. I seem to be playing tennis with support
>>>> and xxxx to get this simple task completed.
>>>>
>>>> THIS IS IMPORTANT AND THIS NEEDS TO BE COMPLETED BEFORE MONDAY NOW.
>>>>
>>>>> On 27 Sep 2019, at 09:21, xxxx wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Well, yes, but surely easier to just grab them from any machine
>>>>> anywhere xxxx or xxxx already have access? Or xxxx puppet?
>>>>>
>>>>> No need for me to spend time looking that up when Dan (or anyone on
>>>>> support) can already do that.

[...]

What’s noteworthy about the above is that unqualified or barely-qualified family members of the above managers are involved too. This is where nepotism rears its ugly head too. That alone can make people sick (metaphorically).

A followup:

….. thanks xxxx…………………..

Now xxxx are you able to follow this or will this still be an issue?….

Kind Regards,

[...]

> Like, it’s really not hard, I’d just rather spend time doing the critical things that *are* hard.
>
>
> On 30/09/2019 10:22, xxxx wrote:
>> Hi xxxx,
>>
>> As it shows below xxxx has not been able to locate the info.
>> Can you please send this agin or direct it to xxxx where he can find these so he can do this on his shift tonight.
>>
>> *_Support, I need this done. _*
>>
>> Kind Regards,

[...]

What’s behind all this? Here comes the explanation:

Sorry, you misunderstand me. I had sickness & diarrhoea during my shift on Monday and when I tried to find xxxx’s key I couldn’t as it wasn’t on any of the machines I looked on. However I have since found it.

On 30-09-2019 10:22, xxxx wrote:
> Hi xxxx,
>
> As it shows below xxxx has not been able to locate the info.
> Can you please send this agin or direct it to xxxx where he can find
> these so he can do this on his shift tonight.
>
> SUPPORT, I NEED THIS DONE.
>
> Kind Regards,

[...]

And later this:

Is there really any need for this constant criticism? It really makes me unhappy in the workplace. I’m sorry I was ill okay?

It has already become a chronic issue at this point. It was harming a person’s health.

Here’s the reply received from the imposter ‘manager’:

xxxx,

There is no criticism applied. I am simply trying to get access for xxxx and xxxx for the last 2/3 months now. Every time support can’t find some information or other. Which surprises me every time with the amount for years everyone has worked with Sirius and these are not new tasks.
It’s very worrying that simple tasks like this are not being finished in time. No one simply takes responsibility and the tasks are passed over constantly. And no one looks for instructions and always waits expects xxxx to take over.
Can we follow instructions and keep things professional please.
xxxx

Later on there was a more detailed explanation of the background:

Please will you supply the specific times over the last 3 months where you have asked us to do this? As far as I can tell its only over the last week. I have explained that I was ill last week when I looked for the key – and I have apologised for being ill too.

And please can you tell me what you learnt on the depression course that you and xxxx went on and how you are putting it into practice? As I have said many times to you now, there a few of us at Sirius who suffer from depression and want to work in a positive environment that is free from constant bullying.

You will get the best from your team if you treat them well and with respect. Constantly putting us down will not produce the best work from us.

This “constant bullying” (I agree) did not stop after this. We were already losing key technical people at that point and the company was thus gradually losing the ability to even maintain its own infrastructure. A lot of the time we were presented with false timelines, cushioning false accusations. The blame/fault was almost always with managers, who not only drove away (or pissed off) colleagues but also failed to take action like paying simple bills.

To give one example, an important client kept having outages because the above managers didn’t even perform simple tasks like paying bills. Some NOC staff kept warning about it. In a handover to shift 2 (09/06/2021), for instance, the NOC person on duty wrote about “Third Invoice Overdue Notice” (yes, third), noting: “Concerned that they’re going to discontinue the service” (this would not be the first or last time).

The manager who did the most bullying at the time was hired not for skills or for relevant experience; it’s a former colleague of the CEO, who used to do secretarial tasks (saying anything more might give away the identity, but this is fact-checked). It’s astounding that around that time personal assistants could suddenly be elevated to management and even act like they’re bosses, clearly incapable of handling the responsibilities. Picking on ill and depressed people was their “pastime”. They fancied the idea of being in control of people vastly more qualified than them (who actually did all the real work, sometimes overnight with ‘jet lag’).