A Bloomington man has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for his role in the $250 million Feeding Our Future scheme that defrauded a federal child nutrition program at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, 34, was sentenced to 210 months in prison on Friday, with a court hearing that while the CEO of the Afrique Hospitality Group, he oversaw the theft of more than $47 million of funding intended to feed needy children during the pandemic.
It was part of a wider scheme that saw dozens of actors claim federal funding to feed children, either exaggerating the number of children they were feeding, or inventing them entirely. Thus far, 70 people have been charged in connection to the scheme, at the center of which was the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which was in charge of distributing some of the federal nutrition funds…