A prominent Pakistani-American businessman who spent years cozying up to powerful Democrats stands accused of being part of a $38 million Medicaid scam.
Civic leader and well-known Brooklyn Community Board 13 member Pervez Siddiqui, 78, was arrested Monday along with seven co-conspirators.
They are alleged to have run a large-scale Medicaid kickback and false-billing scheme through two social adult day care (SADC) centers in Brooklyn: APNA Adult Daycare and Ashiana Social Adult Daycare.
The scam ran from 2019 through December 2025, feds allege, with seniors being signed up for day cares that they rarely or never attended, then getting a cut of the Medicaid payment.
“Marketers are going around looking for the Medicaid card. They stop people on the street, at bus stops. They go into doctors’ offices. They go into NYCHA [government housing] where they know people are low-income. They ask, ‘Do you have a Medicaid card?’” a source with knowledge of the investigation told The Post.
Siddiqui, who owns around 15 pharmacies in New Jersey, is prolific in local political circles and a regular donor to Democratic campaigns, sometimes shelling out over $10,000 a pop to local candidates, records show. And through his ties to another group, he scored an intimate sit-down with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in December 2025, pictures obtained by The Post show.
Shazia Bibi (a.k.a. Shazia Wattoo), Abdul Aziz, Shair Ali, and their recruiter co-defendants Zebun Ahmed, Josna Begum, Saira Khatoon, and Atia Shahnaz were also involved, according to the unsealed indictment against them.
The gang paid cash bribes directly to New York Medicaid recipients to enroll at APNA or Ashiana — even though most never attended their facilities — and paid the recruiters kickbacks to refer patients, while submitting $38 million in fraudulent claims to New York Medicaid for services that were never provided, according to the indictment.
To conceal the fraud, they created fake sign-in sheets far exceeding APNA’s certificate of occupancy on certain days, used Pakistan-based billing staff, and laundered proceeds through shell companies by writing checks disguised as “gifts,” “dividends,” or coded entries like “medicine,” or “laddu,” an Indian word for sweets, according to the indictment.
After a December 2025 federal search warrant was executed, Bibi, Siddiqui, and Ali tried to cover their tracks by telling staff to get new phones and delete data, feds say.
The source said the so-called marketers each manage a group of 30 to 50 patients.
“They keep them together. There’s a cultural element. A Russian marketer will pick up Russians, Pakistani for Pakistanis, Chinese for Chinese,” the source said.
Through his affiliation with a different group called the American Pakistani Public Affairs Committee (APPAC), Siddiqui got unprecedented access to some of the state’s top Democrats, including hosting a fundraiser for New York Attorney General Letitia James in June 2022 at a restaurant in Coney Island.
Mamdani has previously praised the APPAC for its strong support, crediting his victory in part to its get-out-the-vote efforts. At the December meeting where Siddiqui was present, Mamdani praised lawyer Ali Najmi — who has collaborated with APNA and Siddiqui on policy initiatives and panels — calling him “his brother.”
Najmi, who recently received an award from APNA Community Services, is not implicated in the scam.
Medicaid reimbursements to insurance companies — called managed long term care providers or MLTCs — cap at $6,000 a month, per patient, in most cases. Day cares often are one aspect of such Medicaid scams, which may extend into transportation companies, pharmacies and home health care services that use the same Medicaid numbers for payments and kickbacks.
For handing over their Medicaid card, seniors at APNA or their family members were getting $500 a month in kickbacks for day care services that were never provided, according to the source.
Shockingly, the indictment says the payments were made even when enrollees were not in the US. The sources claimed many had even gone to live in other countries while they or their family members collected Medicaid kickback money.
“The patient is in Pakistan, they’re in Morocco. They’re not even in this country,” the source claimed.
Regarding Bibi, 45, the source claimed she is a “thug,” adding: “She doesn’t even know how to write her name. But she’s street-smart.”
In 2018, Bibi, also on Brooklyn Community Board 13, was a featured honoree at a dinner hosted by Brooklyn political org Bay Democrats, just months after Siddiqui personally donated $3,000 to the group, The Post discovered.
In 2022 public testimony before the City Council, Bibi called herself a “community activist” and griped, “we as a Pakistani American Community and as a Muslim American feel alienated because we as a community could not get any resources.”
Three years later, she was sitting next to then-Mayor Eric Adams at a women’s iftar dinner hosted at Gracie Mansion, an event sponsored by Siddiqui-owned Shazia Pharmacy in Coney Island.
The indictment makes no mention of pharmacies or other business affiliated with Siddiqui, who lives in New Jersey but owns extensive property in Brooklyn.
APNA declined to comment to The Post. Siddiqui and the other indictees could not be reached for comment.
Federal law enforcement declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
APNA Adult Day Care has a sister organization, a nonprofit called APNA Community Services, also focused on elderly and immigrant support. The two share leadership teams with Siddiqui listed as the board chair and co-founder on its website.
They operate out of the same facilities and it appears Siddiqui used his association with the nonprofit to cover his alleged illegal activities.
In February, the federal government awarded a $530,000 grant to APNA Community Services, funding backed by New York’s Democratic US Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Two weeks ago, APNA Community Services boss Erum Halif — who co-founded the day care but shifted over to the nonprofit — was invited to a picnic at Gracie Mansion with Mamdani, where she shared beaming videos on social media hanging with the Democratic socialist leader.
Halif told The Post she had not been involved with the SADC for several years and had no knowledge of its operations. She is not named in the indictment.
In a bombshell report earlier this year, The Post visited over a dozen SADCs in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens to find many were nearly empty at peak hours.
Most clients appeared healthy and active without signs of “chronic disability” or mobility issues requiring “nursing home level of care” that is needed to qualify for the taxpayer-funded service. Several facilities were caught serving to-go lunches in strict violation of Medicaid rules.
A Medicaid fraud case revealed last June exposed $68 million was being stolen from taxpayers in a scheme involving two SADCs in Brooklyn. Owner Zakia Khan’s racket paid kickbacks and bribes to marketers for referring Medicaid recipients to her SADCs from 2017 onward.
The source told The Post that in order to keep getting kickbacks, many of Khan’s former “patients” moved over to APNA after that operation got busted — a migration that should have raised flags with fraud detection outfits at insurance companies, but didn’t.
“The patients called the insurance companies — no questions asked — ‘I want to switch to APNA daycare,’” the source claimed.
In February, two Queens men, Inwoo Kim, 42, and Daniel Lee, 56, were charged with a nearly identical fraud, where they allegedly ripped off $120 million from Medicaid in a decade-long scheme that involved two SDACs in Flushing, according to feds.
New York spends the most Medicaid money per patient compared to any other state, and 77 percent more than the national average.
“There is zero oversight. The fraud will never stop because they don’t want it to stop. The MLTCs are funding the politicians because that’s how they make money. They want more and more patients enrolled. They are the reason this fraud has spread so fast,” the source alleged.
“How are the politicians and the insurance companies going to control the fraud when they are part of the fraud?” the source asked.
