Posted on 05/07/2025 1:01:34 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It's absolutely amazing where the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) finds taxpayer money and how it gets there.
The Daily Wire has been investigating a small USAID-linked organization that described itself to Congress as "a low-overhead charity sending its money to Africans." But the African Development Foundation was actually a grifter's paradise, siphoning taxpayer money in the name of charity and sending it to friends and cronies in Africa and the U.S.
Mathieu Zahui, Foundation's chief financial officer, became something of a left-wing hero when Elon Musk and DOGE showed up for an audit. Bravely, Mr. Zahui stood up and demonstrated "how one tiny agency stood up for its mission and rule of law."
No one is really sure what its "mission" is. And as far as "the rule of law," you decide.
Mr. Zahui's objections may not have been based on principle as much as covering up a crime scene.
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 federal contracts…
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
It’s them again, Yogi...
When’s Pam Bondi start?
An IRS audit is needed immediately.
Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to grant DOGE access to its books and told the WH that it would not acknowledge President Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board.
FTA——In Nov 2023, Sen. James Risch, then the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, demanded an “immediate investigation” into ADF’s financial irregularities, including
<><>misuse of official tax dollars;
<><>fraudulent and corrupt spending practices;
<><>conflicts of interest, and gross mismanagement.
Among the irregularities cited was
<><>an alleged $2 million offshore deposit by Zahui into a bank in Ghana in Feb 2023 —
<><>typically requires signature by at least two responsible fiduciary agent,
<><>yet a senior ADF official couldn’t account for discrepancies in the FY2024 budget request.
In an interview with The Daily Wire at his home, Zahui said DOGE changed the locks, but that they didn’t know about a back door, and he had gained access since the takeover. He acknowledged that he selected Gakure’s firm because of their decades long personal relationship, and said Gakure moved to Kenya before COVID to fraudulently depict itself as an “African company” to steal tax dollars.
At the same time Ganiam Ltd was falsely paid tax dollars as an “African company,” Ganiam LLC received roughly $90,000 in US coronavirus tax dollars to prevent the loss of “American” jobs. Gakure did not return a request for comment.
Zahui told The Daily Wire that Ganiam performed IT services during COVID instead of the travel services advertised on contracting documents......with only 30 employees, Ganium was separately paying astronomical numbers of tax dollars sums for IT, including $865,000 to another minority-owned contractor called Etranservices Corp. between 2020 and 2022, promising to bill up to $4 million.
A former agency employee told The Daily Wire that on top of the $800,000 in contracts to Ganiam, the African Development Foundation also awarded it grants.
Zahui initially denied that to The Daily Wire, then conceded it was true. He said it gave grants to Ganiam, which it was required to use, to buy airline tickets for the agency’s African partners to attend events on the continent and to take a pleasure trip to the US, where they visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The amount of “grants” to the company is unknown.
“”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 federal contracts… “”
AGAIN - an IG - and the beat goes on and on and on..
I still want to know just what all the IG’s in all the government agencies are doing while all this freeloading/stealing/corruption goes on! At what point do they consider the time is ripe to write a report on an investigation? It doesn’t appear that they do anything other than write reports - AGAIN - after the barn door is closed!
https://inspectorsgeneral.org/institute-eligibility-
requirements/
“”When’s Pam Bondi start?””
Ask the IG for answers - that was his job!!
“When’s Pam Bondi start?”
Try reading the excerpt, Scooter.
“According to a search warrant application uncovered by The Daily Wire..”
The DOJ does that whole search warrant thingy.
L
Sorry to disappoint, but there is a legal process-search warrant is already issued, and I’m sure IRS is next in line to have a go at this “foundation”. Then come filed charges, court date(s), hearings, etc before any fines or prison-nice and legal like it should be...
Ep does not give a s#*@ about any of those legal things you mentioned. It seems his only purpose here is to trash Bondi and Patel. He does not need any facts.
The entire govt is a grift.
African Aid Agency Most Corrupt; locked doors when DOGE tried to gain access
Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff, Friends
Told Congress it was a low-overhead charity sending money to Africans;
Sent tax dollars to connivers’ offshore bank accounts.
By Luke Rosiak, May 7, 2025, DailyWire.com
Editor’s Note: This is part two in a series of investigative reports on the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting a review by the Department of Government Efficiency. You can read part one at web site link.
When DoGE showed up at USAID-linked federal agency called the African Development Foundation in March, its management locked the doors and refused to let them in. A fired board member sued to stop DOGE, and the group was lauded for resisting DOGE’s demands for “access to USADF systems including financial records, payment and human resources systems.” But the objection, several former employees told The Daily Wire, might not have been on principled grounds, but rather because those records amounted to a crime scene.
The African Development Foundation has an annual budget of just $45 million. But, operating out of sight and out of mind, it might have been the most corrupt agency in Washington, a Daily Wire investigation found. Its employees have been sounding the alarm for years about a culture of self-dealing, abuse, and anti-white discrimination, while those who now object to DOGE’s shuttering of the agency did nothing to help fix it. By law, the agency is only allowed to give grants to Africa-based groups. But it moved money through African entities and then back to the United States to pad salaries of D.C. bureaucrats and pay their friends and former employers, employees said.
Until the DOGE takeover, which culminated in U.S. Marshals ordering building security to let Trump administration officials in, the agency was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after a short stint as a Biden appointee at USAID. An assistant to Adkins said after she asked why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins informed her that the remainder would be coming from an overseas account. He “sent me an email connecting me with this guy in Africa who asked for my banking information. Within a few days this guy wired me $17,000,” she told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. The Daily Wire reviewed bank paperwork showing the transfer from an account in Kenya.
Another longtime employee, she said, was eventually “put on the payroll of an African partner and was informed she was being paid through an entity in Mauritania. No payroll, state or federal taxes were withheld from her paychecks.”
“The contracts don’t make sense and they know [DOGE] will find lots of wrongdoing and illegal activity,” she said. “I’m not a fan of DOGE, but some of the things they’re doing need to be done. They have been operating like this for years and no one did anything about it.” Getting more dramatic now. They are trying to get into the office but the agency won’t let them. Here is a video, shared with permission, of Marocco and some of the DOGE folks outside the elevators pic.twitter.com/VkLmw3hodW — Brett Murphy (@BrettMmurphy) March 5, 2025
Video shows DOGE aides locked out of the African Development Foundation’s office. / @BrettMmurphy
As the Trump administration dismantled USAID and contractors in D.C.’s affluent suburbs complained about the job losses it would cause, some speculated about whether international charity funding was being laundered to politically-connected Washingtonians. That is not dissimilar to what the African Development Foundation did regularly, according to The Daily Wire’s interviews with employees as well as videotaped internal interviews that became part of a lawsuit.
In one instance, it awarded a grant to a Kenyan journalism group called Africa 24 and directed that group to, in turn, pay the salaries of Americans at the federal agency’s D.C. headquarters. That meant Congress thought it was a charitable grant to Africa, and that the agency had a low overhead rate. In reality, the money was being spent on D.C. bureaucrats. Chief Financial Officer Mathieu Zahui acknowledged and defended the arrangement.
“The grant was provided to an African organization…A grant can pay for people,” he told The Daily Wire in an interview at his home, where he has been spending his days after being locked out of the office. “Yeah, granted, they were in D.C.” Part one of this series revealed that last year, the USAID inspector general seized Zahui’s phone and found that he had received payments to his personal bank account from the owner of a company to which he steered contracts, but he has not been charged with a crime.
“We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” a staffer said. “The CEO specifically directed it.”
The agency hired many workers as contractors instead of official government employees, making it possible to pay them using creative funding mechanisms. Once they were hired, executives drew no distinction between contractors and government employees, even having contractors supervise employees, possess government credit cards, and make decisions about money in violation of federal rules, the agency’s former general counsel, Mateo Dunne, told The Daily Wire.
Its CEO from 2016 to 2021, C.D. Glin — a former Peace Corps DEI officer and later an Obama political appointee to the Peace Corps — reverse-engineered African grants to steer money to friends in the United States, employees said. The agency gave grants to the Association of Ghana Industries on the condition that the African group pay Pyxera Global, a D.C. organization where Glin previously worked as director of business development, to “do a study of the artisan sector in Ghana,” agency program manager Kate Ristroph said in a videotaped internal investigative interview with Dunne.
Glin attempted to foist grants addressing nonexistent problems on African groups as a way to steer money to an affiliate of the Aspen Institute, the left-wing Colorado nonprofit, called Artisan Alliance, Ristroph said. The head of Artisan Alliance at the time “flat out tells us she’s a close personal friend of C.D. Glin,” she said.
The agency offered a grant to the Heva Fund, an African group, on the condition that it send a portion to Artisan Alliance. The grant was ostensibly to produce personal protective equipment like face masks, even though Heva told the agency there was no demand for such a thing because affordable personal protective equipment was readily available in the region. Heva was so uncomfortable with the proposition that it asked to cancel the grant, Ristroph said. So the agency pushed the plan on a Kenyan group called Ustadi, which also balked, saying “We don’t need to pay Artisan Alliance, an American company, to help Kenyans learn how to sell masks,” she said.
In another case, a grant to the African group CS Consulting was used to pay the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C. think tank. “It’s all basically a pass through to CSIS,” Ristroph said. She said the agency trains African grantees to avoid third-world style corruption by only giving out contracts that have been competitively bid at arm’s length, yet she was forced to tell them that the Americans were ordering them to do the opposite. “I was on the phone with them…saying we’re signing a new grant to [the Association of Ghana Industries], and there will be a component that is a contract with Pyxera Global that is not competed. It’s already been decided,” she said. “It puts me in a compromising position.”
READ PART ONE: Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend
ADF principles, adkins and glin
Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to grant DOGE access to its books and told the WH that it would not acknowledge President Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board. In Nov 2023, Sen. James Risch, then the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, demanded an “immediate investigation” into financial irregularities, including <><>misuse of official tax dollars; <><>fraudulent and corrupt spending practices; <><>conflicts of interest, and gross mismanagement.
Among the irregularities cited was
<>an alleged $2 million offshore deposit by Zahui into a bank in Ghana in Feb 2023 —
<>typically requires signature by at least two responsible fiduciary agent,
<>yet a senior USADF official was unable to account for discrepancies in the FY2024 budget request.
In an interview with The Daily Wire at his home, Zahui said DOGE changed the locks, but that they didn’t know about a back door, and he had gained access since the takeover. He acknowledged that he selected Gakure’s firm because of their decades long personal relationship, and said Gakure moved to Kenya before COVID to fraudulently depict itself as an African company entitled to tax dollars.
At the same time Ganiam Ltd was falsely paid tax dollars as an “African company,” Ganiam LLC received roughly $90,000 in US coronavirus tax dollars to prevent the loss of “American” jobs. Gakure did not return a request for comment.
Zahui told The Daily Wire that Ganiam performed IT services during COVID instead of the travel services advertised on contracting documents......with only 30 employees, Ganium was separately paying astronomical numbers of tax dollars sums for IT, including $865,000 to another minority-owned contractor called Etranservices Corp. between 2020 and 2022, ptomising to bill up to $4 million.
A former agency employee told The Daily Wire that on top of the $800,000 in contracts to Ganiam, the African Development Foundation also awarded it grants. Zahui initially denied that to The Daily Wire, then conceded it was true. He said it gave grants to Ganiam, which it was required to use to buy airline tickets for the agency’s African partners to attend events on the continent and to take a pleasure trip to the US, where they visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The amount of “grants” to the company is unknown.
Why do we even need this crooked foundation?
The US taxpayer provides a significant amount of aid to Africa, with one source citing $20 billion in life-saving and development assistance over the past few fiscal years. This aid covers various sectors like humanitarian assistance, health initiatives (including HIV/AIDS and public health threats), and economic growth, including agriculture and food security. The US taxpayer has also been a major donor for projects like Power Africa and Prosper Africa.
Humanitarian Assistance:
The US taxpayer provides billions in humanitarian aid, including food assistance for countries facing hunger and conflict. For example, in 2023, the U.S. spent $4.9 billion on humanitarian relief in Africa.
Health Initiatives: The U.S. has invested heavily in combating HIV/AIDS and other public health threats like Ebola, malaria, and tuberculosis, particularly in Africa. In 2023, the U.S. foreign assistance invested $10.6 billion in combating HIV/AIDS and an additional $1.5 billion in addressing emerging public health threats.
Economic Growth: The U.S. also supports economic development through programs like Power Africa, which aimed to increase access to electricity, and Prosper Africa, which aimed to encourage trade and investment between the U.S. and Africa. Agriculture and food security are also a key area of focus.
.
Countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria, and South Africa have been major recipients of U.S. foreign aid. South Africa received over $6 billion tax dollars in foreign assistance between 2012 and 2021.
But you see, properly administered, the money for Africa never leaves America
heh....interesting take.
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