A "Foreign Aid" Official Who Blocked DOGE from Seeing Agency Records Had a Personal Reason to Stop the Audit

Would you believe that he was diverting taxpayer money to a "friend" who then kicked back "secret payments" to his bank account?

Luke Rosniak at Daily Wire:

A foreign aid official who refused the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to his agency's financial records may have had a reason to keep auditors out: he steered illicit contracts to a friend who sent him secret payments, according to a law enforcement affidavit obtained by The Daily Wire.

Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to grant DOGE access to its books and told the White House that the agency would not acknowledge President Donald Trump's appointee as chairman of the board. After a dramatic showdown in March, DOGE physically took over the building with U.S. Marshals, but control of the agency is now the subject of a lawsuit objecting to "swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems" -- an objection that reads differently in light of the criminal probe.

For years, workers at the small, USAID-adjacent federal agency focused on Africa have told oversight bodies about allegations of self-dealing, procurement violations, and mysterious offshore bank accounts, many of them involving Zahui. But little was done about it, several told The Daily Wire.

One action that raised eyebrows was Zahui's insistence on directing both grants and contracts to a company in Kenya called Ganiam Ltd. According to spending records, it was awarded nearly $800,000 in contracts without competition. For example, a one-year, $350,000 contract for "transport, travel, relocation" services was executed in March 2020, when few people were traveling or holding conferences because of coronavirus.

According to a search warrant application uncovered by The Daily Wire, USAID's inspector general established by August 2024 that the company's owner had secretly wired money to Zahui's personal bank account at times that matched up with the federal contracts. To date, the Department of Justice has not charged either man with a crime.

Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, whom Zahui has known for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later moved to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure had been in charge of awarding contracts at the VA, then created his own company designed to get government construction contracts by taking advantage of a minority preference program. It was called Ganiam LLC and was based out of a house in Virginia. Gakure similarly created a company based in Kenya called Gakure Ltd. The African Development Foundation is permitted by law to give grants only to African entities.

In January 2024, inspector general agents interviewed Zahui about the Ganiam contracts, and he acknowledged having known Gakure personally since 1999, and having been to his apartment. He "could not explain why the contract with Ganiam was sole-sourced instead of being competitively bid," the agents wrote.

Zahui was named chief financial officer of the federal agency after he declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on. He acknowledged to investigators that the travel contract was executed after COVID had already shut down travel. He told them the contract was actually used for IT services, but since Ganiam had no expertise in IT, it subcontracted it to a different company. A Department of the Treasury contracting official told the agents that was not allowed.

Read the whole thing. They're stealing us blind, and the Democrat Party protects them, because they all kick back to Democrat Party hacks.

posted by Ace at 02:10 PM

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