Man pleads guilty to wire fraud in connection with Feeding Our Future fraud scheme

A man involved in the massive $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme pleaded guilty to wire fraud in U.S. District Court on Thursday.

According to court documents, from April 2020 through January 2022, 33-year-old Abdikadir Ainashe Mohamud, a.k.a. “AK,” said he was operating a child nutrition site called Stigma-Free Willmar under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future.

In October 2020, Mohamud allegedly approached the owner of FaaFan restaurant and offered to pay him monthly so that he could claim the restaurant as a Stigma-Free Willmar food site.

Less than a month after registering the Stigma-Free Willmar site, Mohamud claimed to be serving meals to 3,000 children a day, seven days a week from FaaFan.

Mohamud created a shell company, Tunyar Trading, and claimed it was a meal vendor for the Stigma-Free Willmar site, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Minnesota.

Between November 2020 and December 2021, Mohamud and his co-conspirators claimed to have served about 1.6 million meals to children through the site.

Mohamud and his co-conspirators prepared and submitted fake meal counts, invoices and attendance rosters. He transferred over $2.5 million from Tunyar Trading to himself and other co-conspirators.

According to court documents, he also created another shell company called Five A’s Projects LLC, where he transferred more than $1 million in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds. That money was used to buy the former location of Kelly’s 19th Hole, a bar and restaurant in Brooklyn Park.

Mohamud allegedly paid more than $225,000 in bribes and kickbacks from Tunyar Trading to Abdikerm Eidleh, a Feeding Our Future employee who was the site support manager for the Stigma-Free Willmar site, in exchange for sponsoring and facilitating the site’s participation in the Federal Child Nutrition Program.

Court records say that in exchange, Feeding Our Future received nearly $500,000 in administrative fees for sponsoring the Stigma-Free Willmar site’s participation in the program.

In December 2021, Mohamud paid $5,750 to a GoFundMe account for Feeding Our Future created by Aimee Bock.

In total, Stigma-Free Willmar received over $5.3 million in payments from Feeding Our Future based on fraudulent claims.

As part of the sentence, Mohamud was ordered to forfeit Kelly’s 19th Hole property and $378,207.20 in fraudulent funds seized from his Tunyar Trading bank account. A sentencing hearing will be scheduled at a later date.

Out of 70 defendants charged in the Feeding Our Future case, at least 35 defendants have now pleaded guilty; five others were convicted at trial.

Two co-defendants, Bock and Safari Restaurant owner Salim Said, are in the midst of a trial that is now in its third week.