5th guilty plea entered in the Feeding Our Future Case

Anab Awad of the Haji’s Kitchen network also entered a guilty plea in an unrelated Medicaid fraud case yesterday.

Through her efforts, $11 million was claimed through the free-food program and $100,000 through the Medicaid program. We previously wrote about her case, unique in that she was facing concurrent trials in both the free-food and Medicaid scandals. Despite her public March 2021 indictment in the Medicaid case, she was still allowed to participate in the free-food program by the state Department of Education (MDE) for another year.

The details of her guilty pleas can be found here. She is forfeiting her house in Rosemount and a Dodge Ram pickup. She is also on the hook for $9.3 million in her share of stolen free-food proceeds.

She operated in the free-food scam under the Haji’s Kitchen network, sponsored exclusively by Feeding Our Future’s arch-rival, Partners in Nutrition (d/b/a Partners in Quality Care (PIQC)).

Partners in Nutrition was suspended in January 2022, immediately after the FBI raids of their rival, Feeding Our Future. Partners is seeking reinstatement to the program for 213 of their sites in simultaneous legal proceedings at the Federal, state, and agency level.

On Monday (Halloween), MDE filed some paperwork in the Federal case. The filing consisted of an October 14 denial of yet another agency level application by Partners for reinstatement. Buried in the legalese is this remarkable nugget in the case (p. 8, para. 14),

PIQC claimed to be serving around 600,000 children when there are only approximately 850,000 children residing in the entire State of Minnesota.

Awad’s nonprofit, Multiple Community Services, is still seeking reinstatement to the free-food program, through these lawsuits, despite her indictment (and now guilty plea) in the case. This nonprofit has three unpaid invoices pending at MDE, two dating from January 2022 and a third from February.

She also operated a site in Faribault under the name Golden Meadows. Two additional unpaid invoices are still pending at MDE under that name.

In the Medicaid case, the U.S. Attorney achieved another courtroom conviction this week.