Date: March 7, 2025
Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov
MINNEAPOLIS — A Lakeville man has pleaded guilty to wire fraud for his role in the $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick.
According to court documents, from April 2020 through January 2022, Abdinasir Mahamed Abshir claimed to be operating a child nutrition site in Mankato, Minnesota, a mid-sized city in Southwestern Minnesota. Abshir ran his food site, Stigma-Free Mankato, under the sponsorship of Feeding our Future. Shortly after creating the Stigma-Free Mankato site, the defendant falsely claimed to be serving meals to 3,000 children a day, seven days a week, from J’s Sambusa, a small restaurant in North Mankato. Abshir also created a shell company called Horseed Management, and claimed it was a meal vendor for the Stigma-Free Mankato food site. Between November 2020 and November 2021, Abshir and his co-conspirators falsely claimed to have served approximately 1.6 million meals to children through Stigma-Free Mankato.
To accomplish their scheme, Abshirand his co-conspirators prepared and submitted fake meal counts, invoices, and attendance rosters. Rather than use fraudulently obtained money to serve meals or feed children, Abshir and his co-conspirators fraudulently misappropriated much of it. Abshir transferred millions of dollars from Horseed Management to himself and other co-conspirators, which included transferring fraud proceeds to a shell company the defendant created called Calikamin Enterprise. Abshir used fraudulent proceeds to purchase a 2021 Range Rover, which has been seized and will be forfeited to the United States.
According to court documents, Abshir paid more than $100,000 in bribes and kickbacks from Horseed Management to Abdikerm Eidleh, a Feeding Our Future employee, in exchange for sponsoring and facilitating Stigma-Free Mankato’s fraudulent participation in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. In exchange, Feeding Our Future received nearly $420,000 in administrative fees for sponsoring the Stigma-Free Mankato site’s participation in the program. In December 2021, Abshir paid $5,750 to a GoFundMe account for Feeding Our Future created by Aimee Bock.
In total, Stigma-Free Mankato received over $5.4 million in payments from Feeding Our Future based on fraudulent claims.
In addition, on Feb. 18, 2025, Abshir attempted to obstruct or impede the administration of justice when he communicated with a cooperating witness in the trial of his co-defendants in United States v. Aimee Bock and Salim Said. Specifically, in the hallway outside Courtroom 13W in the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Abshir approached a witness who was about to testify in the trial. After learning that the witness was about to testify that day, Abshir requested that the witness come with him to the bathroom to have a conversation.
Abshir pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court before Judge Nancy E. Brasel. In his plea, he acknowledges that an enhancement will apply to his Sentencing Guidelines because he obstructed justice when he attempted to tamper with a witness. A sentencing hearing will be scheduled at a later date.
The case is the result of an investigation by the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), FBI, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph H. Thompson, Matthew S. Ebert, Harry M. Jacobs, and Daniel W. Bobier are prosecuting the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Baune is handling the seizure and forfeiture of assets.
IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.