Feeding our future closing arguments

The jury in the trial of feeding our future founder Aimee Bock and the owner of the Salim restaurant will begin deliberations on Wednesday morning after prosecutors and defense lawyers gave their final arguments on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors say Bock was the leader of a $ 250 million scheme to cheat food programs financed by taxpayers for needy children during Covid pandemic. She is accused of wire fraud and bribery. Salim said he faces the same money laundering positions. He was co -owner of the Safari restaurant along Lake Street.

Bock and said that they are among 70 accused accused in the case since the end of 2022

The researchers say that Safari was an important player in the scheme, and diverted $ 16 million from food programs when executing a fraudulent food site and operating as a supplier of other false sites.

The two supposedly luxuriously passed. In the trial, the jury saw Bock photos posing with rented Lamborghinis while on a trip to Las Vegas with her boyfriend. The prosecutors presented evidence that said they buy new vehicles, including a Mercedes with cash, and bought a house of $ 1.2 million in Plymouth.

In his final argument, the assistant prosecutor of the United States, Harry Jacobs, led to the members of the jury five years, to the confusion and fear of the first days of Covid. He said that everyone, from nurses to groceries of groceries, were putting others ahead, but Bock and said they enriched exploiting reimbursement programs to feed children from low -income families.

“While everyone else tried to flatten the curve, they were fattening their wallets,” Jacobs said.

The prosecutor described the crimes a “fraud of epic proportions”, and told the jury that Bock and said they signed in claims increasingly absurd of having served thousands of foods per day since small restaurants that were not close to the ability to prepare so much food.

He also noted that said and its commercial partners spent $ 2.7 million to buy a mansion in Park Avenue in Minneapolis that they used as their headquarters.

“It was a false document store, a fraud factory that was paid for fraud income,” Jacobs said.

Bock’s lawyer Kenneth Uudoibak focused on his client’s claims during his testimony last week that he tried to prevent fraud in child nutrition programs.

“This whole case is about meal counts,” Uudok told the jury. “You cannot hold Mrs. Bock for another person’s actions.”

Uudoibak reiterated his argument that Bock was not aware of the fraud because she ‘sees the false food counting forms and the assistance sheets to the food site that the operators of the food site had presented themselves to it and that feeding our future employees processed. The claims were used as the basis for the reimbursement requests presented to the State.

Uudoibak said his client was bound under contracts with operators of the food site to send those requests and send the state payments to the site operators.

He also noted that feeding our future kept meticulous and organized records and invited the scrutiny of the Minnesota Department of Education, which operates federal food programs at the state level.

“If you want to commit fraud, this is how you do? Do you prepare the evidence for the government to take it?” Uudoibak argued.

Said’s main lawyer, Adrian Montez, focused most of his final argument on the real food that the Safari restaurant served early in the pandemic.

Montez showed that the jury prepared photos of meals for delivery and said that just because there was fraud in other restaurants, it does not mean that there is in Safari.

“They have taken that narrative and tried to transpose that to the Safari restaurant to create a false narrative that the Safari restaurant was doing the same,” Montez said.

He said that other defendants in the case took the business model of said and “corrupted it.”

The Prosecutor’s Office received the last word. In his refutation, the United States assistant prosecutor Matt Ebert reminded the jurors that this was the largest covid fraud scheme in the country and that “they have the power to end this story.”