A Minnesota appeals court has put back the guilty verdicts a Hennepin County judge threw out in a $7.2 million Medicaid fraud case, KARE 11 reported. In a ruling filed Monday, a three-judge Minnesota Court of Appeals panel ordered the case returned to Hennepin County for reinstatement of all six guilty verdicts against Abdifatah Abdulkadir Yusuf, according to KARE 11.
A Hennepin County jury convicted Yusuf in August 2025 on six felony counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle after a seven-day trial, KARE 11 reported. Before he could be sentenced, Judge Sarah West granted a defense motion for judgment of acquittal, effectively wiping out the jury’s decision, according to KARE 11.
SHE SHOULD BE FIRED!! The Minnesota Court of Appeals has reversed Hennepin County Judge Sarah West and reinstated all six guilty verdicts against Abdifatah Abdulkadir Yusuf for a $7.2 million Medicaid fraud scheme.
⠀
A Hennepin County jury convicted Yusuf in August 2025 on six… pic.twitter.com/PqzcEog4ri— Blue Lives Matter (@bluelivesmtr) October 27, 2026
A company run out of a mailbox
Prosecutors told jurors that Yusuf owned Promise Health Services, a Medicaid-funded home health care agency that submitted more than 40,000 fraudulent claims between 2019 and 2022, KARE 11 reported. Investigators found the company operated out of a mailbox on Central Avenue in Minneapolis, even though Medicaid providers are required to keep a physical business location, according to the same report.
Witnesses at trial described billing for services that were never provided, inflated hours and fraudulent paperwork, KARE 11 reported. One woman testified that Promise billed Medicaid for care she never received using signatures that were not hers, according to the outlet. Another witness said she provided four to six hours of overnight supervision for her mother while the company billed for as many as 12, KARE 11 reported.
Jurors also heard that Yusuf personally received more than $1 million from the company’s accounts, and investigators identified more than $400,000 in retail purchases, including spending at Nordstrom and Canada Goose, according to KARE 11. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office said in a press release that Yusuf used the money to fund a lavish lifestyle.
Why the judge tossed it, and why that failed
In her ruling, West concluded prosecutors proved fraud occurred at Promise Health but did not prove Yusuf knew about it or helped, reasoning that his brother could have run the scheme without him, KARE 11 reported. Minnesota’s circumstantial evidence standard requires a court to reject a conviction if the evidence supports another reasonable explanation consistent with innocence, according to the outlet.
The appeals panel agreed West applied the right legal standard but rejected her conclusion, finding that the only reasonable reading of the evidence was that Yusuf knew about the fraud and intentionally helped commit it, according to KARE 11, which reported the decision was written by Judge Wilhelmina Worke. The judges pointed to evidence that Yusuf founded the company, later became its sole owner, repeatedly listed himself as its manager in state filings, helped set up payroll and signed checks from its business account, KARE 11 reported.
FOX 9 reported that the opinion reversed the district court’s post-verdict acquittal and remanded the case for reinstatement of the verdicts. Ellison’s office said the opinion sends the case back to district court for resentencing, and that the jury had also found aggravating factors that support a sentence above Minnesota’s guidelines.
A familiar pattern
The case is one of many Medicaid and social-services fraud prosecutions that have drawn national scrutiny to Minnesota’s oversight of taxpayer-funded programs. Jurors who spoke to KARE 11 after West’s 2025 ruling said they were shocked that their verdict had been overturned. Monday’s ruling means that verdict stands again, and Yusuf now faces sentencing in Hennepin County.
Sources
Sources cited
Sources
- Original post: Blue Lives Matter (@bluelivesmtr) on X, Oct 26, 2026
Posts on X are shown as published by their authors; claims in them are attributed, not independently confirmed unless the article says so. If an embedded post does not load, these links open the originals.