A surrogacy empire owned by a convicted pedophile has come under investigation for arranging fictitious marriages, falsifying documents to smuggle babies out of Ukraine, and trading children for profit, according to a Paris-based consortium of researchers.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has released an investigation which links Barcelona-based surrogacy company Subrogalia to a network of corporations controlled by two men, one of whom sexually abused the other as a child and has an extensive history of child rape.
José María Hill Prados, now 62, was 45 years old when he first met Didac Giménez Sánchez at the Casal Dels Infants del Raval center for minors in Barcelona. Prados exposed 12-year-old Sánchez to pornographic films in order to groom him at his home in Cervelló, Spain, where he also sexually assaulted the boy.
In 2007, Prados was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually abusing both Sánchez and his sister on charges that included raping the children, and for creating illicit pornography of the acts he subjected them to.
Subrogalia has operations in as many as nine countries, including Russia, Greece, and, briefly, Mexico. But the primary source of the company’s revenue can be traced to its clinics in Ukraine. The OCCRP investigation cites a former manager who said that, before the war, women in Ukraine bore approximately 100 babies annually for paying parents, each earning the company around €8,000 (approx. $8,600 USD) in profit.
In order to distance the company from the litigation, Subrogalia Ukraine rebranded as Eurosurrogacy in 2017. Concurrently, Subrogalia Spain was renamed to Gestlife.
Sánchez was also named as the founder of his own Ukrainian IVF clinic in 2017 named InterFiv. In 2021, one of Prados’ sons took over ownership, and that same year the clinic was raided by law enforcement for allegedly arranging fictitious marriages and falsifying documents in order to smuggle babies out of the country.
Prados and Sánchez were also business partners with one of the largest IVF clinic chains in the world, the BioTexCom Clinic in Kiev, which has implanted embryos for about 95 percent of Eurosurrogacy’s Spanish clients.
In 2018, Sergii Antonov, a Kiev-based lawyer specializing in the medical field, told the press that of the estimated 2,000 infants born through surrogacy in Ukraine every year, nearly half were through BioTexCom.
BioTexCom told the press that its management was unaware of Prados’ criminal record when they went into business together. This claim is not entirely without merit: in addition to his surrogacy network, Prados is also the figure behind a shadowy corporation dedicated to burying and erasing incriminating information from the internet.
“We erase your past,” boasts Eliminalia, a business led by the convicted pedophile, which has netted millions in revenue over the past decade for restoring the online reputation of hundreds of clients who have been convicted and investigated in 54 countries for corruption, money laundering, sexual abuse and drug trafficking.
Source: (22) Convicted Child Rapist Behind Surrogacy Empire Now Under Investigation For Baby Trafficking