🇺🇦👶 The surrogacy business has collapsed. Parents lost their money, and pregnant women were left without payments

The international surrogacy agency World Center of Baby, which operated in Ukraine, Georgia, Albania, Cyprus and Mexico, has effectively collapsed and announced that it was filing for insolvency. As journalists from the OCCRP found, clients invested tens of thousands of dollars in the programs. After the company’s financial collapse, the prospective parents began trying to determine where their money had gone. Some surrogates no longer received the payments stipulated in their contracts.

The consequences proved to be far more serious than in an ordinary insolvency. For example, a young Ukrainian surrogate who was carrying a child for a British client was stranded in Albania without the agency’s previous support and died, along with the child, in the eighth month of pregnancy. The local prosecutor’s office is investigating the circumstances of her death. Another Ukrainian woman did not receive the promised $20,800 after giving birth to twins, even though the parents said they had transferred the money to the agency. The investigation also uncovered a tangled network of companies and figurehead managers. One of the directors in Georgia admitted that he had agreed to serve as the company’s managing director for just $100 a month.

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