A Blaine man was convicted Tuesday in a Medicaid fraud case after his agency, Promise Health Services, stole more than $7 million that he reportedly used to fund a “lavish lifestyle.”
Jurors found Abdifatah Yusuf, 44, guilty of six counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle. The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office charged Yusuf last year, with investigators saying his business claimed to provide home and community-based services but was a “sham entity” that operated for years out of a mailbox.
“Stealing money meant for poor people’s healthcare and using it to buy luxury cars and designer clothes is as shameful and disgraceful as it gets,” Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement. “I am committed to recovering as much of the money he stole from taxpayers as possible.”
Promise Health Services claimed to start providing services in July 2019 and over the next three years it billed Medicaid for roughly $7.7 million, according to the complaint. But there was reportedly no medical documentation to justify the billing of more than $7.2 million of that.
An investigation into the provider found “a pervasive lack of documentation for billed medical services at Promise and, when documentation did exist, it was largely fraudulent,” Kailee Potocnik, of the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, wrote in the complaint.
She said she uncovered many forms of fraud at the provider, including overbilled claims, people saying they did not receive services and recipients getting illegal kickbacks.
An attorney for Yusuf did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment.
Yusuf reportedly funneled more than $1 million from the Promise Health Services business account into his personal account. He and his wife, Lul Ahmed, 40, spent more than $22,000 at furniture stores, $42,000 at luxury car dealers and $80,000 at luxury clothing stores such as Coach, Canada Goose and Michael Kors, the Attorney General’s Office said in its announcement of the guilty verdicts.
