The owner of a private school bus company that serves districts in four New Jersey counties admitted he hired unqualified drivers and let them drive unsafe buses that shouldn’t have been on the road.
Ahmed Mahgoub, 65, of East Hanover, faces five years in state prison after he and his East Orange-based company F&A Transportation, Inc., pleaded guilty to false representation for a government contract, the state Office of the Attorney General said Friday.
F&A, which also did business as Smart Union, Inc., and Unity Transportation, Inc. had $3.5 million in contracts with public school districts in Essex, Passaic, Morris and Union counties between 2015 and 2020, officials said.
Mahgoub and his wife, Faiza Ibrahim, 50, will also have to pay $575,000 in corruption profiteering penalties. They are barred from doing business with any public entity in the state for a decade.
Ibrahim will enter the pre-trial intervention program for three years on a charge of tampering with public records. The husband and wife are scheduled to be sentenced June 28.
“There are requirements in place designed to require school bus drivers to meet certain basic, commonsense standards and to prevent potentially tragic traffic incidents,” said Thomas Eicher, executive director of the Attorney General’s Office of Public Integrity and Accountability. “Those who violate the law by using unqualified drivers and commit fraud to circumvent the rules will be held accountable.”
Mahgoub failed to perform drug tests and background checks on drivers, some of whom had disqualifying criminal histories, officials said. In one instance, a bus driver who was high crashed with children on board.
Some of the drivers didn’t have commercial driver’s licenses and had suspended licenses as well.
Mahgoub and Ibrahim also falsified vehicle inspection forms to indicate their buses consistently passed required pre- and post-trip company inspections, officials said. School districts rely on the forms to ensure the buses are safe.
When the Motor Vehicle Commission inspected the buses on two occasions in 2019, most buses failed.
In one example described by the state Office of the Attorney General, an employee of F&A Transportation used heroin in the company parking lot before transporting 12 special-needs children in Newark.
With the students aboard, the 57-year-old driver overdosed and crashed into the wall of a building with police needing to use Nacan to revive the employee, officials said.
Mahgoub and Ibrahim were originally charged in 2020 with misconduct by a corporate official, conspiracy, false representation of representation of a government contract, theft and tampering with public records.
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Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com.
