A St. Paul man has been sentenced to 33 months in federal prison for taking about $1.66 million in money meant to feed children, the 31st defendant sentenced in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota announced the sentence on October 1 for Abdi Nur Salah.
The office says Salah received approximately $1,660,000 in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds. The program reimburses sites for meals served to children, and prosecutors say the scheme he joined billed it for meals that were never served. The $250 million figure covers the whole Feeding Our Future scheme, not Salah’s share alone.
How Salah fit into the scheme
Salah registered Stigma-Free International, a nonprofit prosecutors said was used to carry out the scheme. Its meal sites were in Willmar, Mankato, St. Cloud, Waite Park and St. Paul, according to the charging announcement from September 2022. That announcement said participants submitted fraudulent meal count sheets purporting to document how many children and meals were served.
The sentencing announcement adds a number that shows the scale of the paperwork. Co-conspirators, it says, fraudulently claimed to have served nearly five million meals to children over twelve months, from November 2020 to November 2021. The release attributes that claim to the group around Salah, not to him individually…