Feeding Our Future offices (Photo: AP)
BY: DEENA WINTER
MINNEAPOLIS (Minnesota Reformer) – A defendant in the Feeding Our Future trial testified Thursday that he didn’t set up shell companies to participate in the food program, that he helped serve thousands of free meals to children and didn’t knowingly participate in fraud.
Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, 33, is the only defendant of seven who opted to testify in the case, in which they’re charged with fraudulently getting reimbursed $49 million in federal funds by vastly inflating the number of meals served at 50 locations across Minnesota during the pandemic. Prosecutors say they used the reimbursement money to buy luxury cars, houses, jewelry and property overseas — and very little food.
Shariff created an annual Somali Diaspora Conference, started a podcast called Nomadic Hustle and worked in software engineering in Seattle before moving to Bloomington in the fall of 2020.
“A lot of people in Minnesota wanted me to do work for them because of my work with the Somali government,” Shariff testified. He said he also had a lot of relatives in Minnesota, many of whom filled the courtroom Wednesday and Thursday for his testimony.
He started going to the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington — one of largest Islamic centers in the Midwest — where he met Mahad Ibrahim in a conference room. Shariff said he was impressed with Ibrahim, who had a Ph.D from Berkeley and was a trusted consultant in the community.
“Everybody trusted him,” Shariff said. “My first message to him was ‘I want you to be my mentor.’”
Ibrahim was the president of ThinkTechAct Foundation, a nonprofit that would go on to create dozens of food distribution sites statewide and receive more than $18 million in federal child nutrition program funds. He is also named in the same indictment as Shariff, but is not part of this trial due to a scheduling conflict.
Ibrahim and other community leaders got Shariff involved in a project to build Afrique, an East African community center, in Bloomington. They bought a building at 1701 American Blvd., just a few minutes from the mosque, and were trying to decide what to do with about 20,000 square feet of space. They wanted him to lead the project and “become the face of it to the world,” Shariff said.
He agreed to get on board and was excited about trying to get it off the ground, he said. They envisioned a restaurant, café, event space, business incubator, coworking space and library.
An Afrique promotional pitch showed photos of Shariff with the former president of Somalia and former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, apparently at a conference. Even though the Afrique marketing materials said the company would be financially buttressed by “large, consistent revenue” with high profit margins from the child nutrition program, Shariff testified he “had no idea what that meant” at the time.
Ibrahim had extensive experience in food service, Shariff said. “Anything food service was on him,” he said.
Within two weeks, Shariff was made CEO of Afrique Hospitality Group. Ibrahim was the CFO.
Shariff said the first time he heard anything about the child nutrition program was in December 2020, when Ibrahim and others were working to set up a food program at the mosque, as many members lost their jobs, especially in businesses like hotels and Uber drivers.
Shariff said the first thing Ibrahim asked him to do was file paperwork transferring the Dar Al-Farooq food distribution site from nonprofit Partners in Nutrition to another nonprofit, Feeding Our Future — two nonprofits now at the center of the sprawling federal criminal case. The two nonprofits were supposed to oversee food distribution sites, but prosecutors say they enabled and participated in a massive fraud.
Shariff and the six other defendants — Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Said Shafii Farah, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin and Hayat Mohmed Nur — are the first to go on trial out of 70 people charged in the case so far. Federal prosecutors have said it was the nation’s largest pandemic relief fraud, in which $250 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture funding was misused.
‘Tons of food coming in’
In addition to trying to get Afrique off the ground, Shariff oversaw the logistics of getting food from warehouses to distribution sites, where they were ostensibly given to people. His attorney showed the jury several photos of him and masked volunteers filling bags with food — which a prosecutor later derided as an attempt to support their fraudulent meal counts.
Shariff said he wasn’t involved in preparing billings, invoices and meal counts reported to the state for reimbursement, saying that was the job of the CFO, Ibrahim.
In the summer of 2021, Afrique switched from subcontracting in the food program to directly contracting as a vendor under Feeding Our Future’s sponsorship. Soon, the mosque and a Bloomington school were claiming reimbursement for nearly 2,000 breakfasts and lunches, which escalated to 3,500 within months.
Even though his name was listed as the site supervisor on attendance records for the mosque site, Shariff said he didn’t sign the forms and had no involvement in preparing them, although he testified he thought 3,000 was a reasonable estimate of how many people were given food at the mosque and school.
“I don’t know exactly how many children were served,” he said. “I know it was a lot of food … We had a large-scale food operation (with) tons and tons of food coming in.”
$250,000 payment to Feeding Our Future employee wasn’t a kickback
U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger showed up in the federal courtroom briefly to watch with reporters, spectators and families of the defendants, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson began the cross-examination.
Thompson asked Shariff question after question about check after check written to Afrique by various entities now charged in the case, and about various invoices, attendance rosters and meal counts submitted to the state — which was supposed to be overseeing the federal program — for reimbursement.
Over and over, Shariff deferred to Ibrahim, the CFO, but said he had no reason to believe the numbers were inaccurate, given how much food he was handling.
One big question: Why did Shariff send a $250,000 cashier’s check from Afrique to a woman named Ikram Yusuf Mohamed?
Earlier in the trial, former Feeding Our Future employee Hadith Ahmed — who described himself as Feeding Our Future Executive Director Aimee Bock’s “right hand man” — testified that he took kickbacks to help others get millions in federal funds. After Ahmed was fired by Bock, he was replaced by Mohamed, who he said also took kickbacks. Mohamed is charged with multiple charges of wire fraud, bribery and money laundering.
Shariff said Afrique loaned Mohamed the $250,000 to open a child care facility in south Minneapolis because Afrique construction was taking longer than expected.
“You decided that your startup company that had no revenue outside of the food program would invest $250,000 in a child care company?” Thompson asked.
The child care center never opened, and Shariff said he didn’t know what Mohamed did with the money. Thompson said she used it for “walking-around money.”
Shariff denied it was a bribe, and his attorney showed jurors a $59,000 loan repayment check Mohamed wrote. Thompson noted, however, that the check was written three months after the FBI raids in January 2022, which unveiled the federal investigation, froze bank accounts and ended food payments.
Shariff said Afrique was going through bankruptcy by then, and admitted the cashier’s check was never funded.
When Thompson said Shariff was CEO of a company that only got revenue by acting as a vendor to entities involved in the food program, Shariff disputed that, saying he didn’t know about the extent of their operations, how many children they claimed to be feeding and how much money they were making. He said he didn’t know much about other defendants getting rich, buying homes and cars.
Asked if he found it odd that he left a tech job and made more money working for Afrique, his “most lucrative” job, Shariff said he worked hard and was fairly compensated.
Thompson said Shariff took home $1.3 million in 2021 working for Afrique and as a consultant to other entities involved in the food program, and invested over $1 million into cryptocurrency for Afrique — but in his own name.
“My investors and everybody trusted me,” Shariff said. “They understood.”
Shariff said Afrique had a number of investors, too, opening up a whole new line of questioning.
Defense witness took $250,000 loan from another defendant
Since prosecutors made much of the fact that most of Afrique’s money came from people making money in the child nutrition program, Shariff’s attorney called as a witness one of the company’s investors, Sulekha Farah Hassan.
Hassan swiveled back-and-forth in the witness stand chair as she answered questions through an interpreter.
She talked about moving from Somalia to the U.S. while she was pregnant, and working overnights at Target for about a decade, then working a second job at a small market, saving money to buy an adult home care business in 2008, which she owned until 2021. She and her business partner since 2004, Raaho A. Adan, invested in Afrique.
Hassan told Shariff’s attorney the $460,000 she invested in Afrique was “my own money,” and that none came from the child nutrition program.
During cross-examination by Assistant U.S. Attorney Chelsea Walcker, Hassan said she had “nothing to do with” the child nutrition program. But she acknowledged she opened Mimi’s Bakery in December 2021, and one month later received a $250,000 loan from someone named Hamdi.
Walcker: “Was that other person Hamdi Omar?”
Hassan: “I don’t know the last names … she goes by the name Hamdi.”
Walcker: “Are you aware those individuals are in a company called Feeding Our Youth?”
Hasan: “I did not know what they were involved in.”
Walcker: “Are you aware that Hamdi Omar has been indicted in this investigation?”
Hassan: “I don’t know about her but I’ve heard a number of people were indicted.”
Omar is a St. Paul woman who ran a food distribution site in Waite Park that claimed to have served more than a half million meals, for which she was reimbursed over $1 million, prosecutors say. She is charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Hassan acknowledged she has not yet gotten a dime back on her investment.
“God willing, we will get some returns,” she testified.
The upshot: The defense’s effort to show a legitimate investment in Afrique wound up illustrating yet another connection to a person indicted in the alleged fraud.
Closing arguments in the case begin Friday, and the jury is expected to begin deliberations early next week.
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