New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has returned about $9,000 in possibly illegal foreign donations.
The socialist’s campaign had taken nearly $13,000 from overseas donations, the New York Post reported earlier this month. Two criminal referrals were filed against Mamdani’s campaign over the donations on Tuesday by the Coolidge Reagan Foundation.
Mamdani’s campaign says the remaining $4,000 comes from American citizens living overseas, which are legal donations.
The campaign refunded about $4,000 from 67 overseas donors during the filing period between Sept. 8 and Oct. 20, according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board. One donation came from Ada Diaz Ahmed, a Dubai-based investor, who lent the Mamdani campaign the maximum $2,100.
Mamdani’s campaign continued to receive donations from abroad recently, taking in $130 total from three people in London, Australia, and Germany this month.
The two candidates Mamdani is competing against to be the city’s next mayor, Republican Curtis Sliwa and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, have also received foreign donations. Cuomo has received about $1,100 in foreign donations, with half being refunded. Sliwa has received $70 with no refunds yet.
Both campaigns have said they would return illicit contributions.
A CFB spokesperson told the New York Post that the donations should not have been processed to begin with.
“If the city’s campaign finance portal allowed foreign donations to be processed, that is a system issue the Campaign Finance Board must address and any improper contributions will be returned,” CFB spokesman Daniel Kurzyna said in a statement.
The Coolidge Reagan Foundation argued that Mamdani’s campaign did little to act against the foreign donations.
“These are not isolated incidents or clerical errors,” Dan Backer, a national campaign finance expert and president of the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, said in a statement.
“This was a sustained pattern of foreign money flowing into a New York City mayoral race, which is a clear violation of both federal law and New York City campaign finance rules,” Backer added. “Mamdani’s campaign was on notice for months that it was accepting illegal foreign contributions, and yet it did nothing meaningful to stop it.”
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Backer said the donations amounted to a violation that “undermines the integrity of the democratic process.”
The foreign donations account for a small percentage of the total fundraising haul from the Mamdani campaign, which is about $4 million in private donations.