NEW YORK, (Reuters) – A Burkina Faso man has been criminally charged by U.S. prosecutors in New York over an alleged $12.2 million fraud in which he put millions of people in his home country at risk for malaria by distributing bogus mosquito nets.
Malamine Ouedraogo, 33, was accused on Friday by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of defrauding the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Geneva, Switzerland, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which both provide financing to promote global health.
According to an unsealed indictment, Ouedraogo had promised in 2010 to use funds from those entities to buy more than 2 million nets treated with a long-term insecticide, and made by a Thailand company recommended by the World Health Organization.
Instead, nearly all the nets that Ouedraogo bought and sent to Burkina Faso were made by an unnamed Chinese company and contained little or no insecticide, according to the indictment.
These nets cost as little as 50 cents each, while the nets that the defendant promised to buy cost more than $5 each, the indictment added.
