It seems like Florida’s favorite magician has turned government money (read your money) into a donation that benefited the DeSantis family. A portion of a 2022 fraud settlement agreement involving Centene, the state’s largest Medicaid contractor who overbilled taxpayers $67M, got diverted to the Hope Foundation. This “charity” is overseen by Casey DeSantis. The amount of this “diverted donation” was ten million dollars. The entirety of the $67M settlement was supposed to have been returned to the taxpayers.
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| The Old Shell Game "The cherry on top..." |
Muddying up the waters is the fact that Hope Florida created a second nonprofit called Hope Florida Foundation. State mandated documents and IRS tax form requirements were also lacking. When reporters tried to talk about these entities with the Florida Department of Children and Families, they were turned away. It seems that they couldn’t discuss either of these non-profits because they didn’t yet exist. When pressured, Joshua Hay, the president of Hope Florida Foundation said he was “in the process of creating” the necessary documents.
Hay is also the CEO of a consulting firm and other officers have ties to Walgreens, Koch Industries, and CDR Health Care. By way of explanation, Gov. DeSantis claimed that the $10M was not part of the original settlement. He now wants to call that diverted money “kind of like a cherry on top.” It now seems like that “cherry” got split into two $5M bundles that were then given to other organizations. Those organizations then donated millions to a political action committee.
If you have followed this so far, you can see that they didn’t want you to be able to do that easily. The “old shell game” had the mark trying to keep track of a pea under several walnut shells. Here, the pea has been replaced by a cherry, but the result is the same, the mark got fleeced.
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