A man accused of helping carry out a $3 million fraud tied to the wider Feeding Our Future scandal in Minneapolis offered an apology in court on Monday, moments before he was sentenced to a year in federal prison.
Abdul Abubakar Ali, addressing the judge just before sentencing, acknowledged the impact of his actions.
“Your honor, I just want to say I’m sorry to everyone that my actions have hurt,” Ali said. “This was a mistake. I will try to correct it for the rest of my life. It’s not something that’s in the past. I’ve let down a lot of people. I promise I will attempt to fix it for the rest of my life. So, I’m sorry.”
Ali had pleaded guilty in October 2022, admitting he used a shell company called Youth Inventors Lab to siphon money from a federal pandemic meals program run through Feeding Our Future. According to court filings, he and his co-conspirators filed fake invoices and claimed to have served more than one million meals, despite providing none, allowing him to pocket over $100,000.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel sentenced Ali to one year and one day in prison, a term that could allow him to move to a halfway house for good behavior.
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Both his defense attorney, Kevin Gregorius, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Murphy told the court that Ali had shown genuine remorse. They also pointed out that he was among the first in the case to plead guilty. Murphy noted that Ali’s early cooperation, more than three years ago, helped investigators secure additional guilty pleas and strengthened the government’s broader case in the fraud scheme.
However, Judge Nancy Brasel rejected Ali’s plea for probation, making it clear that a prison sentence was warranted. She pointed to several aggravating factors, including his role in drawing a friend into the scheme and submitting claims that were not just inflated but entirely fabricated.
“This is part of a very large fraud scheme, the largest in the District of Minnesota and one of the largest ever in the country. And you stand responsible for that, and for that reason, I just can’t see, despite your cooperation, a non-custodial sentence here,” as per Brasel. “Let me also add, aggravating factors of not just the money, but the fact that the public trust in government programs has been so substantially undermined and continues to be so. We are still having a conversation in this state about the structure of government programs, given the fraud you participated in, and the impact and ripples of that scheme just keep going on and on and on, and you are one reason for it.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Murphy told the court that Ali had “operated an egregiously fraudulent food site,” even as he argued for a lighter sentence, citing Ali’s early cooperation with investigators. Court records also show that Ali has paid more than $90,000 in restitution so far.
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“I would say that Mr. Ali’s conduct is an aberration from an otherwise law-abiding life. His life is rather remarkable… he attended Mankato State with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, a master’s in electrical engineering from Purdue, he worked as an engineer for a period of time before returning to Minnesota and making, unfortunately, a very, very poor decision, entering into the space of social welfare programs,” Murphy told the judge. “Mr. Ali did immediately accept responsibility, within weeks of being indicted, accepted responsibility and wholly admitted his guilt and provided very valuable and useful information to the government at a very early stage.”
After the sentencing, Ali’s defense attorney, Kevin Gregorius, said he disagreed with the court’s decision to impose prison time.
“He’s going to spend probably the rest of his life, devoted to making things right, not just for himself but for his family and for the people in this state,” Gregorius said, adding later: “Why does anyone do this? It’s opportunity and a little bit of greed, and I truly believe that when this began, Mr. Ali had the best of intentions, and I think he was involving himself in what he thought was still a legitimate program. By the time he realized it was not, I think it was a situation that he was already in it.”