A man who swindled millions of dollars from Covid-19 emergency funding to buy property and luxury vehicles in Kenya and Dubai has been sentenced to 28 years in a US federal prison.
Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, 36, was initially charged with fraud in what US authorities termed as the largest Covid-19 swindling scheme in America.
In what is generally referred to as the "Feeding Our Future case", Farah was accused of orchestrating a massive $300 million fraud scheme involving the diversion of pandemic emergency funds to people's pockets, including his.
Feeding Our Future was a non-profit organisation based in Minnesota and founded in 2016. It claimed to distribute thousands of meals to schoolchildren during the Covid-19 pandemic, but instead stole hundreds of millions of dollars while providing few or no meals.
How the stolen Covid billions were spent.
Photo credit: Nation Media Group
The US Attorney's Office says that Farah, a Somali national, personally pocketed $8 million. He and his co-conspirators falsely claimed to have served over 18 million meals from dummy locations in order to embezzle taxpayer funds.
Somali community news site Sahan Journal first reported that the businessman, apart from pocketing the millions for personal use, was also linked to at least $1 million traced to a 12-storey luxury apartment block under construction in Nairobi. The project is now under investigation by US authorities for potential seizure of assets.
According to court documents, Farah was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programme bribery, federal programme bribery, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and making false statements in a passport application.
He was the owner and operator of Empire Cuisine and Market LLC, a for-profit restaurant that participated in the scheme as a site, as a vendor for other sites, and as an entity to launder fraudulent proceeds. Empire Cuisine and Market and other affiliated sites received more than $28 million in fraudulent Federal Child Nutrition Program funds.
US District Judge Nancy Brasel said the fraud was driven by "pure, unmitigated greed". The court heard that the businessman had used his Minnesota-based restaurant, Empire Cuisine & Deli, to file fake invoices for meals that were never delivered.
The investigation began in 2022 when FBI agents confiscated his travel documents after he attempted to flee the US using a fraudulent passport. He was on a one-way ticket to Kenya.
During his 2024 trial, he was also found guilty of passport fraud.
Besides the fraud conviction, he faces more years in prison for attempting to bribe a juror in the "Feeding Our Future" case. For offering a bag of $120,000 in cash to the juror, he could be slapped with an additional 8–10 years sentence.
The "present" was allegedly left on her doorstep, with a note promising more if she voted "not guilty".
According to prosecutors, Farah exploited the Covid-19 programme by opening fraudulent sites where he claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children a day. He and his associates falsified meal counts and invoices, including fake children's names. He directed the stolen money to others and perpetuated the fraud through a 'pay-to-play' system.
73 people have been charged in connection with the case; 51 have been found guilty, making it the largest prosecution of a pandemic-related fraud in the US.
