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Convicted Child Rapist Behind Surrogacy Empire Now Under Investigation For Baby Trafficking
They cater to LGBQT+ couples and single who want to "adopt"
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.
However, the sentence was anonymized, with Prados’ identity being obscured as ‘Carlos Jesús’ in court records and Sánchez being identified as ‘Baltasar.’ The following year, Sánchez desperately recanted his allegations, claiming he was pressured into making the accusations. But the judge disagreed, having already heard the boy’s testimony presented to the court, and found there was sufficient evidence to sustain the conviction. Prados would go on to serve his full prison sentence.
This was not the first instance of child sexual abuse committed by Prados. In 1996, he was investigated by a Barcelona court for the alleged crime of corruption of minors and several more sexual assaults of which his four adopted children, aged between 12 and 17, were reported to be victims. Prados, then 36, was the founder of a Russian children’s foster organization called Padres para Siempre (Parents forever), and the details of the case were sealed from the public.
Defense lawyer Jordi Rojo used Prados’ children, those he abused, to argue against his imprisonment, and told the court that his client “loves his children very much and is very concerned about what could happen to them now.” The four minors, two brothers aged 17 and 16 and another two boys aged 13 and 12, had been taken into the care of the Generalitat’s Children’s Department during the court proceedings.
On the day the children were expected to testify in court regarding the allegations, they suddenly backed down and denied that they had ever been sexually abused. As the children had not yet made a statement on the record, Prados could not be convicted.
Soon after Prados was released from prison for his 2007 conviction, he legally changed his name to Diego, and he and his former victim became business partners.
In 2015, Prados and Sánchez set up a surrogacy company called Subrogalia based in Spain, according to corporate records. The company, one of over a dozen currently owned by the two men, was quickly mired in controversy and allegations of child trafficking.
The probe into Prados’ extensive criminal empire found that Subrogalia had been investigated in at least two countries out of the nine where it now operates. Alleged crimes include selling and trafficking of babies, in addition to providing clients with infants that were not biologically related to them.
In 2016, the year after the Spanish franchise of Subrogalia was founded, two gay couples sued the company for failing to deliver them sons as promised. A judge ordered the company to pay €88,000 (approx. $95,000 USD) to the claimants for “serious and grave” breaches of contract.
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.
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