Feeding Our Future defendant unlikely to face jail for ‘minor role’ in scam

The latest Feeding Our Future defendant to plead guilty is unlikely to face prison time as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors.

Farhiya Ahmed Mohamud of Bloomington pleaded guilty Thursday to a single count of money laundering, and in exchange prosecutors pledged to drop 21 additional money laundering counts.

Mohamud, 65, admitted setting up a shell company called Dua Supplies & Distribution to hide the origin of tens of millions of dollars that her son, Sharmarke Issa and six others stole from taxpayer-funded child nutrition programs during the pandemic.

Issa, 42, who resigned as chair of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority board after the investigation became public in early 2022, pleaded guilty in September along with several others including Haji Osman Salad. Salad, 32, was the owner of Haji’s Kitchen, a purported food vendor that falsely claimed to have provided millions of meals to food distribution sites.

Since September 2022, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis has charged 70 people allegedly tied to the defunct nonprofit Feeding Our Future with fleecing taxpayers out of $250 million by submitting fraudulent reimbursement requests including phony invoices and doctored meal attendance rosters with the names of non-existent children.

Mohamud was the 23rd defendant to enter a guilty plea. In June, a jury convicted five others and acquitted two.

Because of the large number of people charged, prosecutors split them into smaller groups generally based on the businesses involved. Mohamud was the last of the Haji’s Kitchen defendants to plead guilty, and Judge Nancy Brasel canceled a trial that had been set for early November.

After the hearing, defense attorney John Conard told reporters that prosecutors recognized that Mohamud played a minor role and was “willfully blind” to what her co-defendants did.

“It’s when you don’t have the knowledge to commit a crime, but you should have had it, and that was the basis of the plea and the extraordinary joint recommendation for no jail and only a year of probation,” Conard said.

Mohamud admitted in court that she should have known that the large amounts of money flowing into her business were “coming from a criminal source” because she used little of the cash to purchase food. Mohamud said that she wired money from her business to purchase real estate, including a five-bedroom home in Edina, at the direction of her son.

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