Haji Osman Salad, Wire Fraud, Minnesota 2023

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota – A brazen $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally-funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in guilty pleas from three key players.

Haji Osman Salad, 34, the owner and operator of Haji’s Kitchen LLC, along with Sharmarke Issa, 42, and Khadra Abdi, 42, pleaded guilty to their roles in the massive wire fraud scheme.

According to court documents, Salad, Issa, and Abdi exploited the Federal Child Nutrition Program by enrolling in the program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. The trio then opened sites across the state of Minnesota, as well as multiple shell companies, to facilitate the fraud scheme.

Between June 2020 through 2022, Salad falsely claimed that Haji’s Kitchen was a food vendor for more than 15 million meals to various Federal Child Nutrition Program sites in Minnesota. Co-defendants, Issa and Kawsar Jama were among the largest recipients of purported food from Salad. For example, in November 2021, Salad created fraudulent food invoices falsely claiming that he supplied Kawsar Jama’s Pelican Rapids site, a small town in west-central Minnesota with a population of approximately 2,500 people, with $293,300 worth of food for 140,000 meals and snacks.

Issa, the principal of Minnesota’s Somali Community and Wacan Restaurant LLC, fraudulently received Federal Child Nutrition Program funds under the sponsorship of Sponsor A and Feeding Our Future, respectively. As part of the scheme, Issa used fraudulent records and food invoices to falsely claim his sites served at least 2.3 million meals to children. Issa also operated other entities such as ANS Projects LLC and Bubah Baraka Properties LLC which he used to launder proceeds of the fraud scheme to purchase assets, primarily real estate, which had nothing to do with feeding children.

Abdi, was the principal of Shafi’i Tutoring & Homework Help Center, which was registered as a meal site under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. Between April 2020 and December 2021, Abdi fraudulently claimed entitlement to $3,479,191.92 in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds. However, relatively little of this money was used by Abdi to purchase food.

Sentencing hearings will be scheduled at a later time for Salad, Issa, and Abdi, who each pleaded guilty to wire fraud this week in U.S. District Court before Judge Nancy E. Brasel.