Hibo Salah Daar sought to hightail it from Minneapolis to Dubai when the latest search in the sprawling Feeding Our Future fraud hit the news this past weekend. The FBI must have had her under surveillance. She was arrested at the MSP airport before she departed. She is in custody pending a detention hearing in federal court later today.
After I wrote about her yesterday in “Flying on the ground,” I learned that Daar had been charged with two counts of wire fraud in a May 28 indictment. The facts alleged in the indictment conform to the template in the Feeding Our Future case. I have embedded the indictment at the bottom via Scribd. The Department of Justice press release (lightly edited) briefly lays out the case:
Hibo Daar owned and operated an entity called Northside Wellness Center. In 2020, Daar applied to use Northside Wellness Center as a food distribution site in the federal child nutrition program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. Using Northside Wellness, Daar purportedly served thousands and thousands of meals to children from a small business park on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. At times, Daar completed and signed meal count forms on which she claimed to be serving 40,000 meals to children from the Northside Wellness site each week.
Court documents explain that those meal counts were inflated, and that Daar used false invoices and false attendance rosters to bolster those inflated claims. Daar’s Northside Wellness site submitted over $2.4 million in reimbursement claims. A bank account Daar controlled received more than $1.7 million in taxpayer dollars from those claims. Financial records indicate that Daar used only a tiny portion of those dollars to purchase food and instead transferred most of that money to family, associates, and to herself. Court documents further describe that Daar paid $72,000 in bribes to a Feeding Our Future employee to ensure processing of Daar’s fraudulent reimbursement claims.
The news reports describe Daar as an “Eden Prairie woman.” However, I infer that Daar is an Eden Prairie woman — by way of Somalia, like virtually every other defendant who participated in Aimee Bock’s Feeding Our Future charade. Bock’s fraud drew heavily on Minnesota’s large community of Somali immigrants.
Here is a question I have yet to see asked in the Feeding Our Future fraud. Is there a single Somali immigrant presented with the opportunity to sign on to Bock’s scam who declined, let alone blew the whistle on it?
Hibo Daar Indictment by Scott Johnson on Scribd
