Aimee Bock’s ‘right hand man’ says everyone at Feeding Our Future took kickbacks

A former Feeding Our Future employee who described himself as Executive Director Aimee Bock’s “right hand man” testified Wednesday about how he participated in a massive fraud, setting up sham nonprofits and consulting companies and taking kickbacks to help others get millions in federal funds.

Some of the kickbacks came from seven people and their companies on trial this week — the first out of 70 initially charged in the case.

The money was supposed to be used to help needy children.

Hadith Ahmed, testifying during the second week of the first Feeding Our Future trial,  said he made about $2 million running a fake food site and taking kickbacks while working at Feeding Our Future. He used the proceeds to buy a house in Savage and land in Kenya.

Federal prosecutors say the nonprofit Feeding Our Future was at the center of a $250 million fraud after the U.S. Department of Agriculture loosened rules for food programs during the COVID-19 pandemic to make it easier to get food to children.

Ahmed gave the most damning testimony heard yet against Bock, who isn’t one of the seven defendants in the current trial. Intentionally or not, however, he laid the groundwork for Bock’s prosecution and dozens of other defendants awaiting trial.

Two former teachers, Aimee Bock and Kara Lomen, were friends and business partners running a nonprofit called Partners in Quality Care (aka Partners in Nutrition) that helped child care centers get federal meal money.

After they had a falling out in 2018, Bock took over Feeding Our Future and started competing with her former colleague. Both of their nonprofits grew exponentially during the pandemic, fueled by the federal child nutrition program.

Bock has been charged and pleaded innocent; Lomen has not been charged so far.

Ahmed was born in Ethiopia and grew up in Kenya before moving to the U.S. as a teenager. He opted to cooperate with federal prosecutors in exchange for what he hopes will be a lighter sentence. He said he decided “to tell the truth” but has been made no promises about how much he could get shaved off an expected four to five-year sentence.

Ahmed, wearing a tan suit and peach dress shirt, testified that he was directing a child care center when he met Bock and joined the scam as his center emptied out during the pandemic.

“I didn’t have any income,” he said.

He said a friend named Abdikerm Eidleh, who was in charge of enrolling food sites for Feeding Our Future, encouraged him to get involved with the food program. Ahmed decided to do it because he was seeing people profiting all around him and “I wanted to get rich, make money.”

He and Eidleh incorporated a nonprofit called Southwest Metro Youth and started submitting claims in November 2020. In January 2021, they claimed to give away 1,642 meals, a number that rose to 2,500 meals by March 2021.

“We were not actually giving out anywhere close to that,” he testified. Eidleh was also charged in the case but fled to Somalia.

Bock then offered him a job.

“At that time, Feeding Our Future was crazy; it was booming,” Ahmed said, with over 200 food distribution sites. “Everybody wanted to get involved.”

People were clamoring to set up nonprofits and start submitting claims, he said, and Feeding Our Future staff weren’t checking to see if they were really distributing meals: “Anybody could submit whatever they wanted,” he said.

Ahmed was a site supervisor and later oversaw site supervisors, who were supposed to make sure people were actually giving away meals, but he said, “We were not doing anything. We were not going to sites. Not visiting, inspecting.”

He said “everybody” at Feeding Our Future took kickbacks.

“I think the best way to put it is that Feeding Our Future was a bank: You come and you get money,” Ahmed said. “You submit claims, you get paid.”

He said the defendants and others made up fake invoices from shell companies to make it look like they were buying food for their nonprofit to give away, and he set up a consulting company to deposit kickbacks.

Ahmed said Feeding Our Future employees would get kickbacks for helping facilitate applications for sites, making sure they got paid first and not checking to ensure sites were distributing meals.

The jury was shown numerous checks written by various site sponsors to Ahmed’s consulting company, ranging from $45,000 to $127,000. He said he got about a million dollars in kickbacks.

At Feeding Our Future, he said, “It was all about who was close to Aimee.”

Because Ahmed was close to Bock, he could get applications processed and people paid more quickly, he said.

He said “everything was going through me” because Bock was busy “fighting with MDE” — a reference to the Minnesota Department of Education, which briefly stopped payments to the nonprofit due to suspicions about fraud. After MDE requested justification for claims, Feeding Our Future started asking people for invoices and receipts.

“We didn’t care where they came from or how they created it,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed said the big sites got VIP treatment from Feeding Our Future, and he and Bock made sure nobody checked to see if they were feeding people. People would pick up million-dollar checks from the nonprofit and brag about it — and their new houses and cars — on social media, he said.

At one point, he said Bock forced him to take a plastic bag containing $5,000 cash that she said was from a vendor.

Ahmed testified that the seven people on trial this week — all connected to Empire Cuisine & Market in Shakopee, which prosecutors say was at the center of a $40 million fraud — left Partners in Nutrition and came to Feeding Our Future in December 2020.

A large site at the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington transferred over too, he said. He said mosques made good distribution sites because they were high-traffic areas, were already nonprofits and people could just “submit the address and start claiming … whatever number you want to claim.”

Ahmed testified that he was fired by Bock after he refused to help a prominent Bloomington woman, Ayan Abukar, get retroactive approval of another half dozen sites she claimed she’d been operating.

“(Abukar) said everyone is doing the same thing, why won’t you help me?” Ahmed testified.

The state Department of Human Services awarded Abukar with an “outstanding refugee” entrepreneurship award in 2021, as her nonprofit was claiming to feed 6,400 children per day, multiple times per day, in the child nutrition program. She is charged with bribery and money laundering but is not part of the group on trial this week.

After he was fired, Ahmed said Bock’s lawyer threatened to “go after” him and use the kickbacks against him.  Ahmed told them he wouldn’t say anything if they just left him alone.

He said he felt ashamed about what he did, “Because I stole money from the government.”