Farmaajo held Canadian passport, gave up US citizenship over financial probe-NYT

GOOBJOOG NEWS|U.S: Somalia’s embattled outgoing president Mohamed Farmaajo held a Canadian passport before acquiring another one in the US, a report by the New York Times has revealed adding the former city administrator may have surrendered his US citizenship to avoid a probe on his funds.

The authoritative U.S news outlet reported Friday Farmaajo acquired a Canadian passport in the late 1980s where he had applied for asylum. It is not clear if he still holds the same passport but that might reveal itself when he leaves office.

According to the newspaper, Farmaajo surrendered his U.S passport in 2019 after ‘his finances had come under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service in the United States.’

Villa Somalia announced on August 1, 2019, that Farmaajo had ‘willingly surrendered his US passport’. The development came ahead of his first visit to New York to address the UN General Assembly in September of the same year.

The article also reveals that Farmaajo’s distaste for democracy has been long coming. “Several Somali-American leaders said that in 2007, a bitter dispute erupted inside a Somali community group that Mr. Mohamed led in Buffalo. His two-year term was coming to an end, but some members accused him of trying to cling to power by manipulating the electoral process, they said,” the article reads in part.

Farmaajo is also reported to have deployed underhand tactics to win the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority elections in 1994. “The League of Women Voters, which conducted the election, also received complaints from three housing projects regarding Mohamed’s campaign tactics, according to a league spokesman,” Buffalo News outlet reported then.

Fast forward to 2021, Farmaajo colluded with the Lower House speaker Mohamed Mursal to illegally add himself two more years in office vacating a recent history of peaceful handover of power in Somalia.