Defendant Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff arrives at the Diana E. Murphy federal courthouse in Minneapolis on the 14th day of testimony in the Feeding Our Future trial Friday, May 17, 2024. Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.
Mukhtar Shariff, who was convicted of fraud and other crimes related to the theft of millions from a child nutrition program, changed his story at his sentencing Friday.
Shariff was the first and only defendant to take the stand in his own defense in the first of the so-called Feeding Our Future trials last year, and he proclaimed his innocence of the charges that he stole millions of dollars intended for hungry children. He continued his claims of innocence in pre-sentencing motions to the judge.
On Friday, he was remorseful.
“I let down people who believed in me,” he said in a tearful apology to the judge, to his children, to his wife, and to the community.
“My poor decision and actions contributed” to the compromise of programs meant to help vulnerable people. “For that, I am profoundly sorry”.
Shariff, who was free of a prison uniform and instead donned a tan suit with brown shoes, also acknowledged that his role in the Feeding Our Future scandal has damaged the reputation of the Somali-American community.
“To know that my actions may have tarnished that image and even fueled negative perceptions of that very community is a heavy burden to bear. But your honor, I carry it with me, because it is mine to bear,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel was mostly unmoved, saying Shariff showed “staggering lack of respect to the law and this court.” She derided Shariff’s own testimony during the trial as “not credible” and noted that at trial he “testified to exact opposite” of what he said Friday.
“When the world was at its most vulnerable, you were not a helper, you were a thief,” said Brasel.
She sentenced him to more than 17 years in federal prison.
The harsh sentence — just shy of the prosecution’s request for about 22 years — is sure to send a message to the dozens of Feeding Our Future defendants awaiting trial: A guilty verdict could lead to a lengthy prison sentence. That in turn could compel them to plead guilty and cooperate.
Next month, four more go to trial, including Abdi Nur Salah, a former policy aide to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Aimee Bock.
Bock was the executive director of Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the scheme.
Prosecutors say that in exchange for a kickback, Feeding Our Future agreed to sponsor nonprofits, which would falsely claim to serve thousands of meals per day to hungry children during the pandemic.
The nonprofits received millions from the state Department of Education, which administered the program for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but they spent very little of the money on food for children; instead, they spent the money on overseas trips and properties, cars and jewelry.
Dozens of people have been charged, and 24 have pleaded guilty.
Shariff is the second to be sentenced.
Shariff was the CEO of Afrique, an East African community center, in Bloomington. During the trial, in which five defendants were found guilty of stealing $49 million of food aid, prosecutor Joe Thompson said Shariff took home $1.3 million in 2021 working for Afrique and as a consultant to other entities involved in the food program, and invested over $1 million into cryptocurrency for Afrique — but in his own name.
Thompson was blistering during his statement at sentencing.
“Their scheme involved fake meals, fake kids, fake invoices, fake companies but real money.”
“(Shariff) was up to his eyeballs in this fraud scheme,” and he began “fleecing the state” as soon as he moved here.
Thompson told Brasel that in 16 years as a prosecutor, even after helping prosecute domestic terrorists, he’d “never seen a case like this.”
Brasel said the case had damaged the image of Minnesota and people’s perceptions of government.
The trial of seven defendants, which resulted in guilty verdicts for five of them, featured an attempted bribe of a juror that’s led to two people pleading guilty and charges against three more.
Although Shariff wasn’t charged in the bribery scheme, prosecutors — and Brasel — asserted Friday that he was aware of it and sought to conceal any participation in it by deleting his Signal app when Thompson announced it to the court.
Thompson noted that the bribery conspirators specifically targeted the only person of color on the jury. “(They) played on racial solidarity.”
Despite his guilty verdict and significant sentence, Shariff had many supporters in the courtroom.
Social media posts asked supporters to show up in solidarity, and more than 100 were in the courtroom and an overflow room.
Many cried with Shariff.