Man Pleads Guilty For St. Cloud-Based Feeding Our Future Fraud

(KNSI) – A man pleads guilty as part of the Feeding Our Future scandal after lying about serving meals to thousands in St. Cloud.

The U.S. District Attorney’s Office of Minnesota says 40-year-old Ahmed Sharif Omar-Hashim knowingly defrauded the federal child nutrition program for years. In September 2020, he created Olive Management. Over the next 13 months, it submitted false records showing it had passed out 1.6 million meals. That amounts to 3,000 meals served per day, seven days a week.

Of the 2,040 names that were documented as part of the company’s fake “after-school program,” only 20 could be matched to actual children enrolled in District 742. In total, Olive Management got $7,490,711 from the federal government.

Omar-Hashim, who sometimes goes by Salah Donyale, admitted to one count of wire fraud in federal court on Wednesday. He has not been sentenced yet. Officials from the U.S. Attorney’s Office are still working on seizing his assets.

The Feeding Our Future fraud was broken wide open thanks to an investigation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. It is the largest pandemic-era scandal in the country.

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