Tag: charities

Ex–Nonprofit Leader Who Championed Social Justice Sentenced for COVID Fraud

A former Bostonian of the Year was sentenced in federal court in Boston for using thousands of dollars in donations to Violence in Boston to pay personal expenses and defrauding taxpayers. 

Monica Cannon-Grant, 44, of Taunton, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley to four years’ probation, with six months of home detention and 100 hours of community service. She was also ordered to pay restitution of $106,003 as well as forfeiture in an amount to be decided at a later date. The government recommended a sentence of 18 months in prison.

Cannon-Grant allegedly defrauded the City of Boston out of COVID-19 relief funds and rental assistance money, defrauded the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office out of Community Reinvestment Grant funds, filed false tax returns and failed to file tax returns for two years.

The founder and former Chief Executive Officer of a Boston-based nonprofit was sentenced today in federal court in Boston.

In September 2025, Cannon-Grant pleaded guilty to 18 counts: three counts of wire fraud conspiracy; 10 counts of wire fraud; one count of mail fraud; two counts of filing false tax returns; and two counts of failing to file tax returns. In March 2023, Cannon-Grant was charged along with her co-conspirator and late husband, Clark Grant, in a 27-count superseding indictment. 

Clark Grant’s charges were dismissed in May 2023 due to his death. Cannon-Grant and Clark Grant had previously been charged in an 18-count indictment in March 2022.

In 2020, Cannon-Grant was lauded as a Bostonian of the Year and social justice advocate, recognized for being a “voice for the community” and social justice advocate.

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Virginia Democrat Moves to Squash Oversight of Nonprofits After Somali Fraud Scandal

A Virginia state Democrat introduced a bill that would bar the state from verifying eligibility to receive federal taxpayer benefits.

“No state agency responsible for the administration of federal funds shall impose a requirement on a nonprofit charitable organization providing a federal public benefit to determine, verify, or otherwise require proof of eligibility of any applicant for such benefits,” the one-page bill stated, which was proposed by state Delegate Jessica Anderson.

The Dominion State Democrat’s bill was introduced as the nation has increasingly scrutinized the misuse of taxpayer funds. The Trump administration has moved to clamp down on fraud across many federal benefit programs.

Billions of dollars of taxpayer funds have been lost due to fraud related to Minnesota’s Somali community.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged at least 78 people as part of the “Feeding our Future” scandal, named for a Somali-linked nonprofit that bilked taxpayers of $250 million.

Those accused reportedly faked invoices, attendance records, and the distribution of meals in low-income and other areas in Minnesota.

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Nigerian professor pleads guilty to stealing $1.4 million from Grand Rapids preschool nonprofit

A highly acclaimed Nigerian professor at Aquinas College is facing two decades in prison after she admitted to swindling more than $1 million from taxpayers and poor minority children in West Michigan.

Nkechy Ezeh, founder and CEO of the Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative, pleaded guilty last week to wire fraud and tax evasion in a scheme that forced the nonprofit to shut down after a dozen years preparing about 8,000 preschoolers for kindergarten in Kent County, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, WOOD reports.

Ezeh worked with ELNC bookkeeper Sharon Killebrew to create nearly $500,000 in fake invoices, as well as created fake daycare businesses to siphon off hundreds of thousands of dollars more, which Ezeh used for personal travel to Hawaii, Nigeria and Liberia, according to court documents cited by the news site.

The case comes amid sprawling investigations into fraud in government funded child care programs in Minnesota, Ohio and other states.

The investigations are motivated in part by a viral YouTube video last month that featured what appeared to be a largely vacant “Quality Learing [sic] Center” in Minneapolis that collected $4 million in recent years to provide child care services to the Somali community, Fox News reports.

The learning center is part of a broader scandal involving alleged social services fraud largely tied to the Somali community in the Twin Cities that U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said last month could exceed $1 billion once investigations into Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program are complete. Officials have followed some of the funds to the Somali terror group Al-Shabab, according to Fox.

Ezeh’s attorney, Mary Chartier, told MLive her client “is committed to taking full responsibility and accountability for her actions.

“She is deeply remorseful to anyone who has been negatively impacted,” Chartier said.

ELNC President Amy DeLeeuw offered a decidedly different perspective following Ezeh’s plea hearing in U.S. District Court on Jan. 14, noting in a statement the former CEO’s “failure to meaningfully articulate the nature and scope of her criminal misconduct.”

“Her theft of million of dollars intended for the most vulnerable of children was brazen, all encompassing and unconscionable,” DeLeeuw said.

“To date, Nkechy has made no effort to repay any of the millions of dollars she stole from ELNC,” the statement read. “I trust Nkechy’s demeanor at today’s hearing did not go unnoticed by Chief Judge Hala Jarbou. I and the board will have more to say in our victim impact statement and look forward to her sentencing hearing on May 13.”

Killebrew pleaded guilty earlier this year to engaging in conspiracy to defraud a federally funded program of $1,170,935 and tax evasion, and was sentenced to four years, six months in prison.

Ezeh agreed to pay $1.4 million in restitution to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Early Head Start Programs and other organizations as part of her plea agreement, which also detailed $390,000 in back taxes, according to media reports.

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Explosive report claims a network of charities connected to George Soros funneled $40M to support Zohran Mamdani’s political rise in tax-dodging scheme

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is facing explosive allegations that it benefited from tens of millions of dollars in donations funneled from George Soros-linked charities as part of an elaborate scheme that may have violated federal tax laws. 

The 34-year-old State Assemblyman’s team has always claimed that he rose from obscurity to become New York City‘s mayoral front-runner thanks to an organic, grassroots movement involving many small donations and hundreds of young people with backpacks canvassing on his behalf.

But the Daily Mail can reveal that that narrative is now being called into question  according to a report from a watchdog website.

The findings, from conservative investigative site White Collar Fraud, alleged that a network of tax-exempt organizations connected to billionaire financier Soros shrewdly coordinated political and ground operations to support Mamdani in a scheme that involved laundering more than $40million in charitable donations through nonprofits and redirecting them into political activity.

Soros’s group disputes the report’s findings of improprieties, saying it is ‘riddled with inaccuracies, false assumptions and misinformation’.

‘The math isn’t the only thing that doesn’t add up,’ a spokesman for the Open Society Foundation – that was founded by Soros and is now headed by his 40-year-old son Alex, told the Daily Mail. 

‘The grants it cited – many of which we were earmarked for specific projects and causes elsewhere around the country as we have disclosed – were made years before the mayoral race even began.’ 

But White Collar Fraud investigator Sam Antar told the Daily Mail Soros-affiliated entities may have violated federal tax laws. Antar has filed 11 whistleblower complaints with the Internal Revenue Service as a result of his investigation.

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European Billionaires Funneled $2 Billion Via Transatlantic NGO Network To Erode U.S. Democracy, Finance Anti-Trump Protest Machine

A new bombshell report by Americans for Public Trust (APT), based on IRS Form 990s and media reports, reveals that five foreign “charities” have funneled nearly $2 billion into American leftist nonprofits, injecting what can only be described as a far-left extremist European policy agenda and toxic social-engineering campaigns into U.S. institutions like cancer. The report alleges that these foreign influence operations, exploiting the dark webs of the NGO world, also bankroll part of the protest industrial complex that has waged an ongoing color-revolution-style operation against President Trump, his supporters, and seeks to dismantle the Make America Great Again movement.

APT’s 31-page analysis (first revealed on Fox News), backed by grant records, shows that while foreign nationals can’t directly donate to U.S. political candidates, there is an alarming interconnected web of transatlantic funding networks into the NGO world where foreign billionaires bankroll American far-left nonprofits to unleash all sorts of activist campaigns. This unchecked foreign philanthropy risks undermining U.S. sovereignty, and according to APT Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland, who told Fox News, “foreign money is coming in, and it’s trying to erode our democracy.”

Here are the five foreign funders outlined in the report:  

  1. Quadrature Climate Foundation (UK) – $530 million
  2. KR Foundation (Denmark) – $36 million
  3. Oak Foundation (Switzerland) – $750 million
  4. Laudes Foundation (Switzerland) – $20 million
  5. Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (UK) – $553 million

The key findings are shocking:

Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF): Founded in 2019 by hedge-fund billionaires Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya. Has given roughly $530 million to 41 U.S. groups, including ClimateWorks Foundation ($147 M), Growald Climate Fund ($80 M), Grantham Foundation ($80 M), Windward Fund ($49 M), and Sunrise Project ($36 M). QCF also funds controversial solar-geoengineering research and “climate litigation and regulation advocacy.”

KR Foundation: Danish climate charity tied to the Carlsberg family. Has provided $36 million to 53 U.S. groups backing climate litigation, ESG advocacy, and fossil-fuel divestment. Major recipients include Center for International Environmental Law ($1.4 M), Conservation Law Foundation ($0.4 M), Oil Change International ($2.2 M), and Fossil Free Media ($1 M). It even funded The Associated Press ($300 K) for climate-related programming.

Oak Foundation: Swiss-based trust founded by British billionaire Alan Parker. Gave >$750 million to 152 U.S. groups advancing “climate justice” and lawsuits against fossil-fuel firms.

Key recipients include:

  • Environmental Law Institute ($650 K, creator of the Climate Judiciary Project)
  • Community Change ($1.6 M, linked to Free DC protests)
  • Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($108 M)
  • New Venture Fund ($67 M)
  • NRDC ($6.5 M)
  • Tides Center ($8.2 M)

Laudes Foundation: Established in 2020 by the secretive Brenninkmeijer family (C&A clothing empire). Has sent $20 million to 17 U.S. groups promoting ESG disclosure, “climate-friendly diets,” and equity mandates. Largest grants: Pulitzer Center ($3.7 M) for climate-justice reporting, Ceres ($1.7 M), Community Initiatives ($1 M), and World Resources Institute ($2.8 M).

Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF): Run by British hedge-fund billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn. Sent $553 million to 39 U.S. entities before pledging in late 2025 to halt U.S. funding after APT’s exposure.

Key recipients include:

  • Energy Foundation China ($70 M) — under House investigation for links to former CCP officials
  • Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development ($25 M)
  • Environmental Defense Fund ($17 M)
  • Sunrise Project ($36 M)

ATP points out that these funding flows exploit gaps in U.S. oversight laws, which prohibit foreign election donations but allow influence through 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations. Through the nonprofit world, foreign billionaires can conduct foreign influence operations through leftist nonprofits, including funding protest industrial complex against Trump, get-out-the-vote drives, anti-Trump ads, lobbying, and whatever else.

Sutherland said, “There’s not a question about where it’s going and where it is coming from. We know that it’s foreign money coming into our U.S. policy fights, climate litigation, research, protests, lobbying, you name it“. 

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Nonprofits Cruelly Normalize Poverty for Climate Virtue

The last two decades should have been a period of accelerating economic development for Africa, South America and much of Asia. Discoveries of abundant oil and gas supplies offered a rescue from poverty, industrial stagnation and poor access to electricity and other basic services.

Instead, they got a man-made disaster, a deliberate slowdown of growth driven not by geographical disadvantage or domestic inefficiency but by a global campaign to divert affordable fossil fuels from poor nations.

Examples abound. At the United Nations’ COP26 of 2021, more than 30 governments and a number of public financial institutions committed to the so-called Glasgow Statement, also known as the Clean Energy Transition Partnership. The objective was to end new public finance for fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022 and instead prioritize “green” energy.

The European Investment Bank stopped financing all fossil fuel projects by the end of 2021, affecting billions in planned natural gas infrastructure. Major European pension funds and commercial institutions – BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale – reduced or eliminated support for development projects for oil, natural gas and coal, citing targets to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

The coercion was unequivocal: Pursue fossil fuels and lose access to Western capital. The opposition to hydrocarbons was embraced by Western nonprofit organizations and even by people who had made money from oil.

Just Stop Oil, a malicious anti-fossil fuel outfit, has been bankrolled by the Climate Emergency Fund and Hollywood filmmaker Adam McKay, maker of the alarmist movie Don’t Look Up. The fund draws heavily on contributions from Aileen Getty, heir to the Getty oil fortune, and other wealthy donors.

Rainforest Action Network, Sunrise Movement, Oil Change International, and 350.org are just a handful of so-called non-profit organizations that inject funds into domestic campaigns across the developing world. 

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Drag Queen Show for Kids Advocacy Group Cancelled After Community Backlash

Local complaints have prompted a child-focused charity in New York to ditch a drag event for kids set for next Sunday – and its cancelled drag queen host is not happy.

The Child Advocacy Center of Greater Rochester, a nonprofit “dedicated to giving children a voice and putting an end to abuse,” announced last week it would not hold its “all-ages,” “drag bingo” fundraiser.

Its scheduled cohost, drag queen “Mrs. Kasha Davis,” in reality a man named Ed Popil, took to a Rochester news station and said the cancellation was giving into “hate.”

Popil described his comments in a phone call to Mary Whittier, the charity’s chief executive officer, when she informed him the event was off.

He told the ABC affiliate, WHAM:

I said on that call, well, then we’re letting hate win. Because pretty much on a daily basis, unfortunately, as a drag artist, as a performer, especially when I do story hour, and most recently I was at a Pride festival, and I brought the kids up and we’re dancing, and then when you look at the comments, the hateful, negative, angry comments were plentiful.

Even after the cancellation, which included a formal, obsequious statement by the nonprofit that apologized to “our LGBTQ+ partners, allies, and supporters,” critics continued to pounce.

“Inclusion of LGBTQ should have NOTHING to do with a non profit whose ‘supposed’ mission is to advocate for our communities most traumatized youth. NOTHING!!,” a New Yorker named Michele Fischette wrote on the group’s Facebook page. “Why is this even a thing? Wildly inappropriate…”

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Sorry, L.A. Fire Victims, the NGO Borg Ate Your FireAid Money

We thought it was a betrayal of Los Angeles fire victims that the local government slow-rolled the building permit process to wait out property owners so the state could replace their homes with “low-income” apartments. It turns out, however, that the betrayal has just gotten worse.

We learn this week, thanks to the great work of a lone reporter at a small Southern California publication called Circling the News, that a whopping $100 million donated to help fire victims isn’t making its way to actual fire victims. 

In the fires that started on January 7, 2025, about 6,800 homes were destroyed in the Pacific Palisades. Not all were mansions but all were on very valuable property in a tony section of Los Angeles that is close to Malibu and Santa Monica. In Altadena, a neighborhood close to leafy Pasadena, 9,400 homes and structures were destroyed in the fires. 

Only a few weeks later, the biggest names in show business would come together to selflessly give their talents and time to put on a show that raised $100 million. 

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Questions Surround $100 Million in ‘Fire Aid’ for Los Angeles

Questions are being raised about how the roughly $100 million raised by “Fire Aid” concerts in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires earlier this year is being spent — with some claiming victims are receiving nothing.

The star-studded bill for the benefit concert, held on two separate stages, raised a massive sum. But many residents of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu (Palisades Fire), and of Altadena and Pasadena (Eaton Fire), say they have not benefited.

There have been two significant local investigations by local news outlets, each of which came to different — though not necessarily contradictory — conclusions about Fire Aid’s money.

The first, by ABC affiliate KABC-7, concluded that the money was being well-spent — on organizations:

Roughly 120 organizations split $50 million when the first round of FireAid funds was released in February. 7 On Your Side tried reaching out to every single one of them, and heard back from more than 50 to find out how the money is being used.

…

The Pasadena Humane Society used $250,000 from FireAid to treat and house pets burned and left homeless by the flames.

Heal the Bay received $100,000 and used it to test for contaminants along our coast.

However, Circling the News, as highlighted by local Fox affiliate KTTV,  found that few victims had benefited.

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Warren Buffett donates record $7.7 billion Berkshire shares to Gates Foundation, family charities

American billionaire Warren Buffett donated on June 28 another US$6 billion (S$7.7 billion) of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation and four family charities, his biggest annual donation since he began giving away his fortune nearly two decades ago.

The donation of about 12.36 million Berkshire Class B shares boosted Mr Buffett’s overall giving to the charities to well over US$60 billion.

He donated 9.43 million shares to the Gates Foundation; 943,384 shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation; and 660,366 shares to each of three charities led by his children Howard, Susie, and Peter: the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Sherwood Foundation and NoVo Foundation respectively.

Mr Warren Buffett still owns 13.8 per cent of Berkshire’s stock, based on reported shares outstanding.

His US$152 billion net worth prior to the June 27 donations made him the world’s fifth-richest person, according to Forbes magazine.

Mr Buffett would rank sixth after the donations, which surpassed the US$5.3 billion he donated in June 2024. He donated another US$1.14 billion to the family charities in November 2024.

In a statement, Mr Buffett maintained he does not intend to sell any Berkshire shares.

Now 94, Mr Buffett began giving away his fortune in 2006.

He changed his will in 2024, designating 99.5 per cent of his remaining fortune after his death to a charitable trust overseen by his children.

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