Grateful that the
@FreeBeacon has exposed this. No one should be shocked by this!
🚨Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed landed a $9,000-a-month consulting contract with Wayne County just six days after launching his campaign, allowing him to bill taxpayers roughly $300 an hour while running for office, the Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports.
Public records obtained by the Free Beacon show that Wayne County approved the deal on April 23, less than three weeks after El-Sayed resigned as director of its health services department. The eight-month contract authorized up to $72,000 for 30 hours of work per month providing “strategic support” during the leadership transition.
The payments were routed through AME Higher LLC, an entity El-Sayed created as a pass-through for consulting and speaking fees. “The news comes as El-Sayed has faced questions over his use of a tax loophole to avoid payroll and income taxes on payments he received through AME Higher LLC,” Goodman writes. His latest financial disclosure shows that he paid himself a $64,000 salary from the company and took another $103,000 as a “member draw,” a common strategy for avoiding payroll taxes, accountants told the Free Beacon.
The Wayne County deal was not El-Sayed’s only consulting work during the campaign. He has also collected more than $82,000 from One Health Partners, a Chicago-area nonprofit health care company that former employees have called a “scam.” The Free Beacon reported that the company focuses on buying medical practices and “exploiting Medicare” to increase revenue. It is run by Ali Karim, one of El-Sayed’s largest campaign donors, who was sanctioned by Wisconsin regulators for defrauding an investor and has been accused of fraudulent business practices in multiple lawsuits.
El-Sayed has bragged about his two-year tenure running Wayne County’s health department on the campaign trail, claiming he “led the rebuild from the studs” of its troubled juvenile detention facility. Investigators, however, found the facility “flooded with sewage and garbage” and littered with “dried feces and bodily fluids.” The facility later lost its full operational license and was placed on probation by state regulators.