Nolosha Development hosted several public events in 2022, renting out a theater in downtown Minneapolis and a hall at Hamline University to promote a planned housing community to eager Somali community members.
Muhammed Mohamud, 27, attended two of the events along with his father, Abdulkarim Mohamud, and his cousin, Siraji Noor. Hundreds showed up at the meetings, including an Islamic teacher Muhammed’s family trusted.
Helming these meetings was Abdiwali Abdullahi, a young, charismatic public health professional who, with his wife, was the brains behind Nolosha. He showed renderings of a planned suburban community that featured lakeview properties, a school, a mosque, several restaurants and a grocery store. Nolosha promised to be a solution to the social determinants of health and the lack of generational wealth affecting the Somali community.
Muhammed and his family were smitten.
“The project sounded like an amazing opportunity to grow the Somali community and the culture,” Abdulkarim, 58, wrote in a sworn affidavit filed in state court this month.
Muhammed, who is Abdulkarim’s oldest son, was on the verge of getting married. Abdulkarim planned to surprise him by buying him a home. Nolosha seemed to provide the perfect opportunity.
Nolosha asked for $25,000 from each homebuyer to reserve a spot in the development, eventually collecting deposits from at least 160 people, according to the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.
Muhammed’s father and cousin were among those eager customers; they made payments in September 2022 with the promise of receiving a move-in ready house by November 2023. The date came and went with no keys to any home.
Now, they’re desperately trying to recoup their money. For the last several months, Muhammed said, Abdiwali, who serves as Nolosha’s CEO, has given them the runaround.
“All we have is bounced checks,” Muhammed said. “We trusted him because he grew up here, and he’s very educated, very articulate — but very dishonest.”
The Attorney General’s Office estimates that Nolosha has collected a minimum of $1 million from clients through deposits, and is suing the company for consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices and false advertising.
While the Attorney General’s Office has said that the lawsuit was prompted by “numerous complaints,” Siraji is the first client to speak to the media about his concerns. He and Abdulkarim have also filed their own lawsuits against Abdiwali, seeking to reclaim their money.
Nolosha is also under investigation by the FBI.
“He defrauded people,” Siraji said of Abdiwali. “It’s a false project. It’s not happening.”
“I had high hopes for this development and what it could do for the Somali community,” Abdulkarim said in the affidavit the attorney general filed as part of its case against Nolosha. “My wife has had a lot of anxiety and high blood pressure being stressed out about this home. What was supposed to be an amazing gift for our son has turned into a nightmare.”
Abdiwali, 27, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.
Nolosha currently has no legal representation, and may face default judgment later this month for failure to comply with court orders to hand over several documents to the Attorney General’s Office.
The troubled development isn’t anywhere close to breaking ground. It hasn’t obtained city permits and doesn’t own the 37-acre parcel of land in Lakeville that it has promised to develop. The property’s owner backed out of a purchase agreement with Nolosha last December after Nolosha failed multiple times to meet deadlines to buy the land.
Promised halal loans
Siraji, 37, a truck driver who provides for three young children, started paying monthly installments to Nolosha in 2022 for about eight months to meet the $25,000 deposit.
Abdulkarim and his wife paid their deposit in one lump sum that same year after saving for years. He works up to 70 hours a week as a Metro Transit dispatcher; his wife works as a teacher in the St. Louis Park Public School District.
Siraji and Abdulkarim say they paid deposits for five-bedroom houses that were priced between $375,000 and $420,000.
It would have made Siraji, who rents a home in Edina with his wife and children, a first-time homeowner. Abdulkarim owns a home in Brooklyn Park, where he lives with his wife and three of their children.
“It was going to be a big community. It was going to have a mosque, a place to get your haircut, a big halal market, restaurants,” Siraji said. “It was going to be a better way for me, that’s why we went with it.”
Nolosha’s website is awash with photos of spacious and modern bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms, as well as a fancy restaurant, a gym and a boardwalk at a park. The website still has a page for prospective homeowners to file applications to get on Nolosha’s waitlist.
At Nolosha’s promotional events in 2022, Siraji, Muhammed and Abdulkarim were shown powerpoint slides with renderings of their future homes. Nolosha did not give them materials or forms to take home, Muhammed said. But they were convinced to get on board because of the events’ high attendance, the professional demeanor of the presentations, and the presence of notable community members like Minneapolis City Council Member Jamal Osman.
Jamal also appears in a promotional video for Nolosha that is posted on the company’s website next to text that reads, “Welcome to Nolosha Lakeville.” Under that, a message declares, “The first community built from the ground up with a focus on public health and community wealth-building!”
Below the message, a “Pay Deposit” button takes users to an application form where prospective homeowners can pay Nolosha $500 to get on a waitlist.
Jamal is seen in the video giving a speech in support of the development at an event at Hamline University. In the video, Jamal explains that health conditions like diabetes and mental health issues “come from the environment, it’s not something you’re born with.” He speaks of Nolosha as a place where racism and language barriers wouldn’t exist. The people who live in Nolosha, he explained to the crowd, would be “people you can talk to, people who respect you, people who know your story.”
“This endeavor that these brothers we’re supporting are doing, it’s a very good idea,” Jamal says in the video. “Can you imagine today a place that our community owns? These people, by the way, are by the book.”
Jamal, who represents parts of south Minneapolis, including the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood that’s home to a large Somali population, did not return several messages seeking comment for this story, and has previously declined other interview requests about Nolosha. He is not named in the attorney general’s case against Nolosha.
Abdulkarim and Muhammed said there was a sense of credibility to the project because Abdiwali has a bachelor’s degree in health management from the University of Minnesota, and his wife, Sumayya Farah, who also worked for Nolosha, has a public health degree from St. Catherine University.
A key part of Nolosha’s pitch was the promise of halal loans to avoid interest payments, which Siraji, Abdulkarim and Muhammed said was the top priority in finding a home. Interest is considered haram, or forbidden, in Islam, so many Muslims rent homes for several years as they save enough money to buy a house without relying on conventional loans.
“That was the main motivator,” Muhammed said, referring to the halal loans. “It’s really hard to own a home in America that does not involve interest [payments].”
As the family’s oldest son, Muhammed helped his parents navigate the homebuying process with Nolosha. He later led their efforts to recover their money, eventually posting videos about their dilemma on social media as a final resort. Muhammed told Sahan Journal he decided to go public with his family’s situation because he’s known in his community, and because he could take any potential backlash.
The comments on Muhammed’s videos are overwhelmingly in support of him, but he said he’s received backlash, mainly from unknown people calling his phone and telling him to stop.
Muhammed said Nolosha told its clients that they would pay the company a set monthly price for 20 years, and that buyers would not be able to sell their own homes during that time. If buyers bailed out early, the house would go back to Nolosha, Muhammed said.
Muhammed said his parents and cousin were willing to accept the terms because of their desire to avoid interest payments. He said this is true for the many other people who signed up for Nolosha.
Nolosha called the $25,000 payments “pre-reservation” fees, and stated in the fine print of its purchase agreements that the fees did not guarantee that buyers would receive homes. Nolosha characterized the agreements as a promise for clients to be at the front of the line to buy homes when they are built and move-in ready.
“The unit reservation agreement gives you the opportunity to accept a future opportunity to purchase a home,” Abdiwali said in an April 2024 deposition in the Attorney General’s Office case against Nolosha.
Siraji and Abdulkarim, however, said that Abdiwali described the deposits as down payments for their future homes. Abdulkarim alleged that Abdiwali even promised that Nolosha would contribute a matching $25,000 toward his deposit.
“Mr. Abullahi said he was able to do this because no realtors are being used, so Nolosha would use the money it saved on realtor fees to help finance the houses,” Abdulkarim wrote in his affidavit.
Nolosha’s promises began changing right after Siraji and Abdulkarim started paying for their future homes. The company originally planned to build in Jordan but switched to Lakeville. And then it increased the price of single-family homes to $600,000 and of duplexes to $480,000, according to Abdulkarim. Single-family homes were originally priced between $375,000 and $420,000.
Nolosha officials told prospective homeowners at a June 2023 meeting that inflation caused the price changes, according to Abdulkarim and Siraji, as well as Lakeville being an expensive city.
“This was very unexpected and not what we had been promised,” Abdulkarim wrote in his affidavit. “I was concerned that the plan continued to change.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Nolosha then scrapped all single-family homes from its plans, and turned them all into duplexes or multi-unit buildings, according to statements Abdiwali made in his April 2024 deposition.
Muhammed and Siraji decided that they would live next to each other in a duplex now that their single-family homes had been scuttled. The families were told the duplexes would equal roughly 1,500 square feet per unit, and that each would include five bedrooms, an attached garage and a bedroom with its own exterior entrance for elderly relatives.
‘It just didn’t make sense’
Nolosha told its customers that construction on the project would begin in the fall of 2022. Homes were supposed to be move-in ready in two phases in November 2023 and May 2024. Cousins Siraji Noor and Abdulkarim Mohamud were supposed to be a part of the first phase.
Muhammed Mohamud first grew suspicious when November came and went without his father, Abdulkarim, receiving keys to the family’s new home. But he was partly reassured when Nolosha’s CEO, Abdiwali Abdulahi, explained to them that the construction delay was caused by the city of Lakeville adding restrictions for the development, specifically for one of its major roads.
Muhammed was familiar with how bureaucratic red tape can delay development projects. He volunteers in housing advocacy for the Golden Valley Housing and Redevelopment Authority, and works independently as a housing case manager for families.
“The way he [Abdiwali] was speaking about it, he seemed very knowledgeable,” Muhammed said. “It didn’t seem like some low-down dirty lie.”
What he didn’t know was that Nolosha had met with Lakeville city officials for the first time in November 2023, according to a sworn affidavit from Lakeville Planning Manager Kris Jenson that was filed with the attorney general’s lawsuit.
To date, Nolosha has not submitted applications to the city for permits to develop the land. Jenson said in her affidavit that the 37-acre parcel of land is a challenge to build on no matter the developer.
“Both the topography and the significant wetlands on site present challenges for the use of the site,” Jenson wrote.
More time continued to pass without receiving keys to the house. Muhammed grew antsy. He grew outraged in the summer of 2024 after Sahan Journal wrote about the state and federal fraud investigations into Nolosha, and the Lakeville parcel’s ties to the Feeding Our Future fraud case. The story, which was the first time the information was shared publicly, set off alarm bells for Muhammed, his father and his cousin.
The Lakeville parcel was purchased in 2022 with money from two defendants in the Feeding Our Future case, both of whom have pleaded guilty in the $250 million fraud case. The two defendants — Haji Salad and Ayan Abukar — are awaiting sentencing.
The federal government put a notice of lis pendens on the Lakeville parcel in 2022, effectively tying up the property until the legal matters are resolved in the Feeding Our Future case. It will likely seize the land afterwards.
“As a Muslim, it is not OK to buy something that is stolen,” Abdulkarim wrote in his affidavit. “So the fact that the land was involved with Feeding Our Future money was worse than buying land with interest.”
Abulkareem, Siraji and Muhammed met with Abdiwali and other Nolosha officials in September 2024. They demanded refunds.
Muhammed expressed concern at the meeting that the land was tied to the Feeding Our Future case, which involved 70 defendants allegedly stealing federal funds that were meant to feed children during the COVID-19 pandemic. He said Abdiwali told him that the attorney general was singling out Nolosha because of other fraud, and that the state investigation amounted to harassment of Nolosha’s clients.
The explanation seemed odd to Muhammed’s family, who had not been contacted by the attorney general at that point.
“It just didn’t make sense,” Muhammed said of Abdiwali’s explanation.
Abdiwali then offered to show the family the land by the end of that month. They accepted the invitation, but the meeting never happened.
For the next two months, Muhammed said he and his family attempted to track Abdiwali down to press for refunds, showing up at Nolosha’s office in Eden Prairie many times but never catching him there.
Finally, Abdiwali sent him an email in early December 2024 promising them refunds. He offered to pay them back in cash, which they rejected, Muhammed said.
“If you go to the bank with $25,000 in cash, they’re going to think you’re a burglar or something,” Muhammed said. “You have to show where the source of the money came from.”
Abdiwali then told the families that it would take 30 days to process their refunds. Thirty days came and went. Nothing. Frustrated, Muhammed posted a video on Tiktok in early January 2025 explaining the situation and demanding that Nolosha refund his family.
The next day, Abdiwali contacted the family and told him he was sending a cashier’s check in the mail, Muhammed said. Abdiwali even gave the family a fake tracking number for the supposed cashier’s check, stating it was on the way. The tracking number was for an unrelated package that Abdiwali sent to himself, Muhammed said.
Abdiwali later admitted to the family that he never sent a cashier’s check, according to Muhammed.
In the middle of January 2025 Abdiwali gave Siraji and Abdulkarim checks for $25,000 each, respectively. When they tried to deposit them into their bank accounts, both checks bounced.
Abdiwali then cut off communication with the families. Abdulkarim, Muhammed and Siraji later went to the Attorney General’s Office and the courts for help. Losing the money has been a hardship.
“It’s real tough,” Siraji said. “That’s our savings. We need that to buy a house.”
Abdulkarim and Siraji are hoping their lawsuits and the attorney general’s lawsuit against Nolosha will provide them relief. The attorney general is asking a judge to order Nolosha to refund all of its clients.
Court records show that Nolosha has given partial refunds to at least two of its clients. One of them, Nazra Mohammad, received $21,000 of the $25,000 she paid.
“I feel it is unfair Nolosha kept $4,000 of my deposit as a penalty as they did not uphold their part of the bargain to provide me with housing,” Nazra wrote in a sworn affidavit filed in court earlier this month.
Another, Hassan Hamza, said Nolosha kept $5,000 of the $25,000 he paid. He was also told the $5,000 was a penalty for backing out of the contract.
“I felt the contract was misleading because the home was not going to be ready by November 2023 and Nolosha did not even own the land in Lakeville,” Hassan wrote in a sworn affidavit filed in court earlier this month. “This all caused a lot of financial and emotional stress for my family.”
Nolosha Development appears to be spiraling to an end. The company violated a court order to hand over internal documents as part of the attorney general’s lawsuit. The Attorney General’s Office is pursuing a default judgement against Nolosha for not following the court order, and for not currently defending the lawsuit. Nolosha has not had a lawyer for most of this year.
It’s unclear whether Abdiwali or Nolosha will have anything left to refund clients should a judge rule in the attorney general’s favor.
A court hearing on the attorney general’s motion for sanctions against Nolosha is scheduled for April 29 before Hennepin County District Court Judge Christian Sande.
“This guy is a thief,” Siraji said of Abdiwali. “I don’t know what he’s doing with the money.”
Staff writer Mohamed Ibrahim contributed to this report.
