A Minnesota judge sentenced Ahmed Ghedi and Abdihakim Ahmed to prison on Wednesday in the Feeding Our Future fraud case, handing down more than five years for Ghedi and four and a half years for Ahmed. Prosecutors said the two helped run a child nutrition operation that was supposed to serve thousands of children in the Twin Cities area but instead diverted public money into cars, property and cash sharing.
The sentencing matters now because it is the latest punishment in a case that has become one of the biggest pandemic relief fraud prosecutions in the state. Amee Bock, who ran Feeding Our Future, was sentenced in May to nearly 42 years in prison after being convicted of orchestrating $250 million in fraud. She told the court then, “I understand I failed. I failed the public, my family, everyone.”
Ghedi and Ahmed were part of a scheme prosecutors said pulled in $7.3 million in COVID relief funds meant to support the program. The money was supposed to feed children, but prosecutors said it moved through fake distribution sites, fabricated lists of children and kickbacks before ending up in personal use. That is why the restitution numbers were not the same: the judge ordered Ahmed to repay $2,242,590 and Ghedi to repay $2,862,451, reflecting the amounts tied to each man’s share of the scheme.
The case has already led to the convictions of dozens of people, many of them from Minnesota’s large Somali community. It began with FBI raids in 2022 and then expanded into charges against the network behind Feeding Our Future, which prosecutors said operated less like a nonprofit and more like a cash pipeline.
What remains unresolved is not whether the fraud happened. It is how much of the money can still be recovered from the people convicted so far, and whether the remaining sentences in the case will bring the losses any closer to being repaid.
