MINNEAPOLIS – Three individuals have pleaded guilty to their roles in the $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally-funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced United States Attorney Andrew M. Luger.
According to court documents, Bekam Addissu Merdassa, 40, of Inver Grove Heights, Hanna Marekegn, 40, of Medina, and Hadith Yusuf Ahmed, 34, of Eden Prairie, admitted that between 2020 and 2022, they knowingly and willfully conspired with others to participate in a fraudulent scheme to obtain and misappropriate millions of dollars in federal child nutrition program funds that were intended as reimbursements for the cost of serving meals to underprivileged children.
According to his guilty plea, Merdassa used a non-profit entity called Youth Inventors Lab as a shell company to carry out his scheme. Merdassa and his co-conspirators enrolled Youth Inventors Lab in the Federal Child Nutrition Program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. After enrolling in the program, Merdassa and his co-conspirators immediately began submitting claims for reimbursement for purportedly serving meals to hundreds or thousands of children a day. In support of these fraudulent claims, Merdassa and his co-conspirators prepared and submitted fake invoices purporting to document the purchase of food from a vendor, S & S Catering. But Youth Inventors Lab never received any meals from S & S Catering to serve at its site. In total, Youth Inventors Lab…
