Foreign Aid Official Suspected Of Bribery Is Back At Work After Court Ruling

Staff at the African Development Foundation, a USAID-affiliated federal agency, have returned to work after a D.C. judge overturned the Trump administration’s abolition of the agency — even as a new inspector general’s report blasted the agency for misleading Congress.

A USAID inspector general’s report released Thursday lists Mathieu Zahui as one of the agency’s current top employees, even though the IG told a D.C. judge last year that it had seized Zahui’s phone and found evidence that he took secret payments from a company to which he steered suspicious contracts.

Early in the Trump administration, Zahui told the White House that the agency would not recognize Trump’s appointment of Peter Marocco, who successfully disbanded USAID, as acting chairman of the African agency. Staff subsequently locked the doors to physically prevent DOGE auditors from entering.

The Trump administration ultimately took control of the building with the assistance of U.S. Marshals and laid everyone off. But after an African company sued on the basis that all of its profits came from the U.S. agency, complaining that shutting down the agency would cause it irreparable harm, a D.C. judge granted an injunction temporarily invalidating Marocco’s moves. D.C.- and Africa-based staff and contractors were all immediately reinstated to their jobs and canceled grants were restored, despite the fact that a ban on new foreign grants remains in effect, significantly reducing the amount of work for them to do.

Thursday’s IG report made that reversal all the more remarkable, finding that the agency had only raised a quarter of the money from African partners that it publicly took credit for, that nearly half of its grants had insufficient documentation, and that the agency did not conduct any “due diligence” before entering into financial agreements with African entities.

The African Development Foundation is funded by about $50 million a year in taxpayer money, but it is supposed to leverage that with funds raised from African governments and other groups, giving them skin in the game. The agency never actually collected three-quarters of the money that it implied to Congress it had raised between 2022 and 2024, according to the IG probe.

In its 2023 Annual Report, the African Development Foundation, or USADF, reported that “$45.6 million in leveraged partner funds was secured,” but in reality, it only received $9 million that year, the IG report said. “Similarly, in its FY 2024 Congressional Budget Justification, USADF reported that it anticipated leveraging more than $15 million in external funding that year. Yet, by the end of FY 2024, USADF had received just $2.5 million in partnership funding.”

In all, records showed that “32 partners pledged up to $69 million between FYs 2022 and 2024. However, of these pledges, USADF only received $17 million,” the IG found. African governments only actually “provided about $8.2 million of $41 million (20 percent) pledged.”

The agency told the IG that it had no mechanism to force African governments and other groups to follow through on their commitments. The IG said this was because it drafted agreements that “were not legally binding,” and “did not conduct any pre-award assessments or due diligence on prospective partners.”

For some partnerships, it had no documentation at all, the report found: “Based on our reviews of USADF’s website, partner funding receipts, and other public reporting, we determined that USADF may have had up to 17 additional active partnerships. For example, USADF’s website identified a payment card company foundation, a clean energy investment company, and a development nonprofit as strategic partners. However, USADF could not provide MoUs or any other documentation to confirm the status of these partnerships.”

A Daily Wire investigation previously reported that one such partnership was with Herbalife, a multi-level marketing scheme whose then-CEO sat on the government agency’s board. The partnership involved providing Africans with “product donations, and Herbalife Nutrition staff as global volunteers in their businesses,” marketing materials said. It came two months after Herbalife paid $122 million to the Department of Justice to settle charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Daily Wire’s investigation also showed that the agency misled Congress and the public about how much money went to Africa as opposed to administrative costs by having African grantees and contractors re-route money back to D.C.

The IG report said “we discovered that USADF officials knew of suspected misuse of Foundation funds and equipment purchased from Foundation grants but failed to report this information to OIG as required.” It said that the agency failed to keep track of where its money was going: Forty percent of grants had incomplete project development documentation and the same number lacked evidence that it had trained the grantee on keeping track of finances. The agency pays African “partners” to inspect grantees on the ground, but for most grants, the agency’s database was missing these site visit reports.

Thursday’s inspector general report was limited to certain aspects of the agency’s business and its methodology was established last year, before the dramatic changes at the agency. But USAID OIG confirmed that its investigations into matters relating to the foundation are active and ongoing. That raises the prospect that although CFO Zahui was reinstated after being laid off, the back-and-forth might end in his being hauled out of the office in handcuffs.

A November 2024 search warrant application unearthed by The Daily Wire laid bare a criminal probe involving the agency’s mysterious payments to Ganiam Ltd., a company owned by Zahui’s friend Maina Gakure. In February 2024, agents seized Zahui’s work phone and found “text messages showing at least eight instances of wire transfers or electronic payments from Gakure to Zahui’s Bank of America account, totaling over $10,000. These payments coincide with USADF’s awarding of sole-source contracts to Ganiam,” they wrote. As of now, Zahui has not been charged with a crime.

The agency’s other top current employee, according to the report, is Elisabeth Feleke. Feleke was accused by former general counsel Mateo Dunne of ordering him to stop an investigation into rulebreaking at the agency. Dunne filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging retaliation and anti-white racial discrimination, but an EEO judge dismissed it, and he is appealing.

A former official with the USAID inspector general’s official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Wire that the African Development Foundation “treated federal dollars like Monopoly money… it was a culture of reckless indifference to accountability and oversight.”

Included in the report is an acknowledgment of the IG’s findings by the foundation.

“USADF appreciates the work of the USAID Office of Inspector General in conducting this evaluation of our strategic partnerships and grants administration,” says a management response to the findings. “We concur with the overall findings and recommendations and acknowledge the opportunities to strengthen our internal
policies, procedures, and reporting practices.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch (R-ID) said on X that the new report provides further evidence that the agency “is beyond repair” and should be abolished.

Related: This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why.

PART ONE: Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend

PART TWO: African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff

PART THREE: Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor Africans

PART FOUR: ‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says