The Minnesota Court of Appeals restored the Abdifatah Yusuf guilty verdict reinstated in a $7.2 million Medicaid fraud case on Oct. 26, 2026. The court reversed a post-verdict acquittal and sent the case back for reinstatement of six guilty verdicts against Abdifatah Abdulkadir Yusuf.
Those verdicts came after a seven-day trial in which jurors found Yusuf guilty on six theft counts and found aggravating sentencing factors. The court said the record held enough circumstantial evidence to support the convictions, including more than 40,000 fraudulent reimbursement claims and more than $7.2 million in payments tied to Promise Health Service LLC.
Promise Health Service LLC records
Promise Health Service LLC was a Medicaid provider agency Yusuf and his wife opened in 2018. The company was first listed in Burnsville before Yusuf later changed its address in state records to a Central Avenue location in Minneapolis.
Investigators who searched the Minneapolis location in 2022 found Promise using a mailbox instead of a physical office. The court said Promise records were mixed with records from other provider agencies at the location, including businesses tied to Yusuf’s family.
The opinion said Yusuf repeatedly identified himself as Promise’s owner, manager, contact person and authorized agent. It also said Yusuf helped set up Promise payroll in May 2020 and signed checks from a Promise business account, including checks to his brother, Mohamed, labeled as loans.
Minnesota charges and trial evidence
Minnesota charged Yusuf in June 2024 with racketeering and six counts tied to fraudulent billing from October 2019 to August 2022. After the seven-day trial, the district court dismissed the racketeering charge before jurors considered the remaining counts, then later threw out the six guilty verdicts.
The Court of Appeals said the district court’s post-verdict acquittal could not stand because the trial record supported the jury’s findings. Trial evidence described false paperwork and services that did not match the billing, including a former employee’s testimony that she created client documents without meeting recipients and copied and pasted sections.
Other testimony said Promise billed for more overnight care than was provided, used documents a recipient said she did not sign and billed a minor client for more service hours than were authorized. Investigators also testified that Yusuf personally received more than $1 million from Promise accounts.
Money flows through Promise accounts
The same evidence traced large transfers out of Promise accounts. Investigators testified that Mohamed received more than $359,000, while testimony described more than $361,000 in payments with no identified business purpose, more than $2.5 million paid to people without background studies, more than $268,000 in peer-to-peer transfers and more than $400,000 in retail purchases.
Those retail purchases included more than $56,000 at Nordstrom, more than $3,000 at Canada Goose and more than $14,000 at Feldmann Imports. Each of the six charged time periods involved more than $35,000, and some of the six charged time periods topped $1 million.
The remand sends the case back for reinstatement of the jury’s guilty verdicts, leaving Yusuf with the restored convictions rather than the acquittal entered by the district court. The record now returns to the trial court for that step, and the opinion leaves the legal fight focused on the verdicts the jury already returned.
