Two Years Later Sirius Open Source is Basically Dead (With a Zombie Web Site)
1 day from now it's exactly 2 years since Rianne and I resigned (at 1am and only a few minutes apart). Life has been a lot better since then. Below it's the two of us last week, enjoying life in spite of crimes and abuses directed at us because we run/lead important sites. Rianne's site turns 20.5 very soon.
AS mentioned about an hour ago, tomorrow is the anniversary of my (and also my wife's) resignation from Sirius Open Source. For her it was after more than 9 years of good service for the company, for me it was nearly 12 years. I hadn't yet known about the crimes the company committed against my colleagues and I.
The decision to leave was definitely the right one. It had also been premeditated. Our sites have thrived since then (steadily over 1.2M requests per day) and the company we left has been sinking since the day we left. After we left many colleagues left as well. That had a lot to do with our own resignations. Colleagues and esteemed buddies used to tell me that the CEO used me as a recruitment card because of my qualifications and online reputation.
Checking official files from the British government (without taking screenshots this time around, just examining the underlying text), Sirius is basically dead now; they sort of killed off the companies - yes, plural! - and all that's left is no financial activity, only a mountain of debt (not worth obsessing or boasting about though). For the original company it says 1 employee (for the second year in a row, that's the CEO who stole money from staff; his ex-wife got in contact with us, expressing support for us). This one is 143.5k in debt; he (the perpetrator of pension fraud) later created a new shell and the other shell is half a million pounds in debt (so in total about 650k in debt).
Sirius Open Source is basically finished. All the key people who knew how to run the systems (or serve the clients) left for good and the company's chief hides in the US after he took money from Bill Gates under an NDA. We'll probably never know what exactly happened there. Was this sabotage?
Do not mind the Web site of the company. 90% (or more) of the people named as staff don't work there and some haven't worked there for over half a decade already!
We now know that some of the people who committed crimes against my family also contacted Sirius Open Source. They admit this.
Finding or fully attaining justice for pension fraud would be too expensive to be worth it (we explored crowdfunding with ex-colleagues; their lawyers said legal fees would exceed what can be recovered and the company would formally shut down to avoid compliance with court rulings), but for other things it's worth every penny [1, 2].
Life is full of surprises and elaborate scams (bringing that up apparently killed the linuxjobs mailing lists more than a year ago). Sirius Open Source taught me not to trust payslips, even if formally issued by certified accountants in London. It also taught me that the British system is willing to cover up white-collar crimes instead of helping victims of it. I escalated to my MP, the police, London Town Hall (our former biggest client)... to no avail. They do not want to acknowledge their role in pension fraud, even if they know about it. █