in 2019. Alleged Teachers Group connections Media and government investigations have linked Planet Aid, through its board members and financial dealings, to a controversial organization from Denmark called the Teachers Group or Tvind, led by international fugitive Mogens Amdi Petersen. Tvind has been characterized by former members as a secular/political cult, and Tvind leaders have been prosecuted in Denmark for financial crimes, with two convictions in trials in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Planet Aid has denied any such links, although they are a member of the Humana People to People Federation, an offshoot of Tvind, and several leaders of Planet Aid had been identified as having ties to Tvind and Petersen. Planet Aid co-founder and board chair Mikael Norling is a Tvind official, and he was present at the preliminary hearings for the Danish Tvind trials in September 2002. Planet Aid CEO Ester Neltrup was the Executive Director for the Tvind-run Institute for International Cooperation and Development, and has stated that she and others on Planet Aid's board of directors were Teachers Group members. Marie Lichtenberg, the director of international partnerships at Humana People to People and Planet Aid, was identified by Danish law enforcement as a manager of Tvind's global financial operations. Josefin Jonsson, a founding director of Planet Aid, was also a founding director of IFAS, a foundation identified by Danish prosecutors as a front organization used by Petersen for embezzlement and tax fraud. In March 2016, an investigation co-produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and the Public Radio Exchange reported that, according to interviews with "several (unnamed) insiders" of Planet Aid and associated Humana People to People member organizations, including "at least a dozen people inside" DAPP Malawi, "50% to 70% of the US government grant money was being siphoned away" to Tvind. The USDA issued a statement saying that "none of their formal compliance reviews, their ad hoc reviews, their site evaluations, or their audits of the Planet Aid projects have yielded any significant findings or concerns", although documents obtained by the CIR stated that a USDA program analyst who had visited the project in Malawi was concerned that the use of funds was ineffective and lacked transparency. A follow-up report by CIR cited a 2001 report by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation that identified Planet Aid, Humana People to People, and DAPP as part of a network of organizations that diverted