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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).

HAVE just checked again and new numbers, for week 13 at least, came out this morning, 5 days after the last time. The numbers are astonishing as they show 2,000+ more deaths than the 5-year average (including pandemic years).

So for a single week, week 13, we’ve leapt from 9,580 to to 11,584 deaths (+2,004).

Compared to 2019:

Video download link | md5sum 54b92623f894a04b61343f93c5d75ba5
Sirius Corruption Roundup
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The crimes committed by my last employer are becoming very apparent and crystal clear to see; meanwhile there are other crime victims coming out of the woodwork and we shall give them a voice, not just further information

THE Sirius ‘Open Source’ series is being followed closely by a lot of people. It’s routinely mentioned in Techrights and Tux Machines, even my personal site for more important topics/aspects.

Many people are impacted by this issue, even if one person is more vocal about it (I’m fortunate to have a platform in which I can speak about this). For the sake of geeks, and for human/labour rights (or “tech rights”), we need to expose what happened in the company I knew from the inside for nearly 12 years. We have lots left to publish and plenty is still being investigated (several things are always being investigated in parallel).

As the a video above notes upfront, I didn’t expect to cover any criminal aspects, but while doing the first batch I stumbled upon anomalies and started contacting authorities, companies, former colleagues etc. It didn’t take long to realise what sort of hydra we had all along dealt with; many workers were robbed and bullied, but the company threatened people not to speak about it with colleagues. Well, enough is enough and the ‘dirty laundry’ will come out. The world needs to see a workplace that isn’t just toxic but also corrupt. Many insiders (back then) didn’t realise the scale of the abuse, but they realised this afterwards or are coming to realise it now (with more facts being made publicly available). The company must have had several hundreds of workers over the years (if one counts associates and partners, maybe 300) and quite a few of them got burned. They’re not alone anymore and accountability will be pursued. The CEO of the company ran away last month, but he too cannot hide. He’s still in the UK, hiding in his ‘tax shell’ (registered at the address of the accountant). At the moment we explore all the legal avenues; exposing what was in the NDA (signed with the Gates Foundation when staff was compelled to sign a new contract in a likely illegal fashion) would be a cherry on the cake. Maybe there will also be arrests, but that can take a long time. That’s OK. We have patience. The facts are on our side.