Fraud: Liberian Government Official Moonlights as Director at Minnesota Group Homes

Not everybody is this brilliant, but apparently at least one man is. 

He is Sekou Dukuly, a government official in charge of Liberia’s government-owned port facilities who also happens to own a whole bunch of assisted living facilities in Minnesota and even “runs” three of them himself from his home in Liberia. 

This incident raises enormously troubling questions about the Walz administration’s failed oversight of the state’s group home industry.

Sadly, Tim Walz and Amy Klobuchar have been more focused on advancing their national political ambitions than fighting Minnesota’s fraud…

— Lisa Demuth (@LisaDemuthMN) August 17, 2026

I’m pretty certain that few people could do both of those jobs well. Perhaps he is the Liberian Elon Musk—when he was appointed to run Liberia’s ports, he was feted as a brilliant businessman. But I seriously doubt Musk could actually run the day-to-day operations of healthcare-related businesses from 3300 miles away. 

In 2024, at a ceremony in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, an emcee praised the business acumen of Sekou Dukuly, the newly installed director of the West African nation’s government-owned port system.

Dukuly had been “delivering multimillion-dollar profit increases everywhere he worked,” the emcee said.

Dukuly didn’t make his money in international shipping, however. He cashed in on Minnesota’s booming group home industry.

Minnesota companies linked to Dukuly collected at least $36 million in taxpayer funds over the past 10 years, according to Minnesota Open Checkbook, a state website that provides transparency in government spending. Dukuly has had a hand in businesses that have run at least two dozen group homes, almost all in the northwestern suburbs of the Twin Cities. The state issued licenses and paid Medicaid dollars for those businesses to provide care and supervision to Minnesotans, typically those with mental illnesses or physical disabilities.

But an investigation by MPR News and its national investigative unit, APM Reports, shows that Dukuly’s financial success has come at a human cost, with multiple instances of residents being neglected and even dying in group homes linked to him. And the money has gone into bank accounts tied to alleged financial schemes in Minnesota and abroad — raising questions about the state’s oversight of the group home industry and the billions of dollars that have flowed into it.

Dukuly’s involvement in the group homes linked to him varies. In most cases, he set up the companies behind the group homes, and often he declared an ownership stake in those companies. Some of the group homes have operated out of houses he owns or has owned. And until a reporter contacted him last week, he was also the director in charge of day-to-day operations at three of them.

It’s good to know that Somalis aren’t the only Africans who are benefiting from Minnesota’s burgeoning welfare fraud industry. Soon enough, we will learn that enterprising people from around the world have been getting their cut of the Minnesota taxpayers’ contributions to world prosperity. 

Group homes are licensed by the state, which also pays for their services. It’s good to see that Minnesota Public Radio has stumbled onto the story that, perhaps, the state’s failure to keep an eye on the business raises “questions about the state’s oversight of the group home industry and the billions of dollars that have flowed into it.”

Gee, I might have a few of those questions. So does Lisa Demuth, the Republican candidate for governor in this year’s election. 

Of course, I think the major question it raises is what percentage of the state’s social services budget is handed over to fraudsters. We are well past the point where anybody questions that the entire system itself is corrupt. It appears to exist for the benefit of fraudsters and not much else, and those fraudsters implicitly include the government bureaucrats and politicians who have allowed this to happen and, in the case of politicians, have harvested some of the proceeds to keep the money flowing into the Democratic Party infrastructure. 

As refreshing as it is to see that Minnesota Public Radio has discovered something is wrong with how the government distributes social service dollars, the fact itself has been well established for years and largely ignored until the federal government started putting fraudsters in jail. And, to be clear, it is the feds who have been doing so, while state governments and the courts have done their best to downplay the problem and have even given sweetheart deals to fraudsters. 

They can even get convicted by juries, only for judges to throw the verdict out. 

MPR has resources no other local news outlet can match, and it should spend its time digging into the politicians who have allowed this to happen, including Peggy Flanagan, the Lieutenant Governor and now the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. There’s nothing wrong with exposing more instances of fraud—I applaud them for it. But the more important rot is in the system, and it needs to be torn apart. 

And it shouldn’t take federal investigations to get the ball rolling. 

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