Two men were sentenced to prison on Wednesday for their roles in what prosecutors call as the country’s largest pandemic fraud case.
According to court documents, Ahmed Ghedi was sentenced to more than five years in prison, while Abdihakim Ahmed received four and a half years. Both men were found guilty of wire fraud and money laundering.
Both individuals, like many of those convicted in the case, falsely claimed to run a child nutrition site, according to prosecutors. He claimed to be feeding thousands of children per day at a site in St. Paul, using federal COVID-19 relief funding.
According to prosecutors, Ahmed and others used the funds — around $7.3 million in all — to purchase a car and property, as well as pay kickbacks to a Feeding Our Future employee.
According to the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, Ghedi collected a total of $7.2 million from the Federal Child Nutrition Program through fraudulent claims.
Aimee Bock was sentenced to 500 months in prison on various criminal charges, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit federal program bribery. Bock, the creator and executive director of Feeding Our Future, was found in court to have engineered a quarter-billion-dollar fraud on the Federal Child Nutrition Program. Salim Said, a co-defendant in Bock’s trial, was also convicted on several counts.
Dozens of additional people have been convicted in connection with the Feeding Our Future fraud.
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