Next Feeding Our Future trial set for April after defendant rejects plea deal
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The next Feeding Our Future trial is expected to begin April 20 after one of the defendants in the sprawling case appeared in court Wednesday and rejected a plea deal from prosecutors.
Gandi Abdi Kediye, who’s also known as Gandi Yusuf Mohamed, told U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel that he is not interested in a proposal from prosecutors to plead guilty to one count of wire fraud in exchange for a sentence of 27 to 33 months.
Kediye, 45, is among 79 people charged since late 2022 in connection with a scheme to steal $300 million from taxpayer-funded child nutrition programs during the COVID-19 pandemic by setting up phony meal distribution sites and submitting reams of fraudulent reimbursement requests for millions of meals that were never served.
Prosecutors allege that Kediye used his company GAK Properties to launder some of the millions stolen by a group that includes five family members and a friend.
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Soon after Kediye rejected the plea offer, Ikram Yusuf Mohamed, his sister, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in exchange for a recommended prison sentence of six to 10 years. Mohamed, who was a consultant to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future at the center of the wider conspiracy, admitted that she personally pocketed more than $1.3 million that she obtained from her co-defendants.
Mohamed, 43, also admitted that she helped her sister, husband, mother, and friend enroll their own nonprofits in the federal child nutrition programs. Altogether the group collected more than $12 million after Feeding Our Future took a 10 to 15 percent cut.
Also on Wednesday, Ikram’s husband, Shakur Abdinur Abdisalam, 47, pleaded guilty to his role in the scheme. Abdisalam admitted setting up a nonprofit called “inspiring youth & Out reach,” enrolling it as a fraudulent meal site under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future, and falsely claiming to have served more than a million meals to children throughout 2021.
Abdisalam’s plea agreement calls for a prison sentence of around two years, but he could serve as little as 10 months if Brasel determines that he was a minor participant in the conspiracy.
Abdisalam agreed to pay nearly $457,000 in restitution; Ikram’s plea agreement calls for her to repay $1.3 million to the government.
The couple’s guilty pleas bring the total number of convictions in the Feeding Our Future case to 60, including seven people who were found guilty by juries at trials in 2024 and 2025.
GAK Properties, one of Kediye’s companies, owns at least five houses in the Twin Cities metro area that are used as Medicaid-funded group homes for people with disabilities. Kediye’s wife Samsam Mohamed manages three of them, and the businesses have billed the state for millions of dollars in the two years since Kediye was charged.
Because Samsam Mohamed was never charged with a crime, the Minnesota Department of Health and the Department of Human Services say that there’s no legal action that they can take against the businesses.
Another group home that’s in a GAK-owned house had been operated by Ikram Mohamed at the time she was indicted. But the MPR News and APM Reports investigation found that she no longer manages that home.
Mohamed’s plea deal does not mention the group homes, but prosecutors pledged not to pursue any other charges against her for “any matters presently under investigation by the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota.”
The latest Feeding Our Future plea deal and Kediye’s upcoming trial come at a time of crisis for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office.
All of the federal prosecutors who’d been working on the Feeding Our Future case and related investigations into Medicaid fraud quit in protest over the Justice Department’s response to the killings by immigration agents of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti.
Matt Murphy and Rebecca Kline, both experienced prosecutors, will represent the government at Kediye’s trial, which is expected to take about a month.
Last week the assistant U.S. attorneys asked Brasel to delay the June trial of another defendant, Abdirahman Ahmed, who was among the first defendants charged in the case in September 2022. Ahmed was a co-owner of Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, which obtained $16 million from the scheme.
Ahmed’s attorney Dane DeKrey writes in a Monday filing that his client is ready to go to trial.
“[I]f the government wields its awesome power to charge, it must accept the consequences that flow from it,” DeKrey writes. “And any staffing challenges related to Operation Metro Surge should not change the analysis.”
In 2025 a jury convicted Salim Said, also a Safari co-owner, as well as Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock on all charges. The two are jailed and awaiting sentencing, but Brasel has not yet set sentencing hearings for them.
