It seems that after leaving prison, Il Prados officially changed his name to Diego. Judging by corporate documents, to register Subrogalia in Ukraine, he used a Spanish identity card in a new name, but journalists also found a previous document in the name of José Maria.
Perhaps Il Prados changed his name before registering Subrogalia to hide his criminal past. Industry expert Maria Dmitrieva said Ukrainian laws do not prohibit a sex offender from owning a surrogacy agency.
“The whole industry is regulated by two paragraphs of the law and two ministerial directives,” she said.
Over time, Subrogalia expanded and began operating in Russia and Greece. For a while, the company operated in Mexico. But the main work continued in Ukraine: according to a former employee, before the war, Ukrainian women gave birth to about a hundred children a year for clients, each child brought about 8,000 euros to the agency.
The company soon ran into legal trouble in both Western and Eastern Europe.
BioTexCom employees were accused of being part of a “criminal gang” that used surrogacy programs as a front for child trafficking. According to the prosecutor’s office, they helped “foreign citizens to make illegal transactions involving minors”, which is tantamount to “trafficking in children for a monetary reward.”
One of the accomplices was named Eurosurrogacy, and as a result, the company’s bank accounts were frozen. The investigation is ongoing.
“To date, criminal proceedings have been suspended, no legal proceedings have been carried out since 2019,” BioTexCom said in a statement. It also says that the investigation did not reveal the facts of the birth of babies who are not genetically related to the ordering parents.
Il Prados did not respond to questions about the Eurosurrogacy investigation. BioTexCom said that at the beginning of the cooperation they did not know about his criminal past, and upon learning, they suspended the joint work.
Real estate, police and money stash
It seems that BioTexCom and Subrogalia are connected not only by business.
Initially, Subrogalia was registered in the city of Kropyvnytskyi in Central Ukraine. The building belonged to BioTexCom owner Albert Tochilovsky. His multi-million dollar real estate portfolio also includes a mansion in the center of Kyiv, where the BioTexCom clinic is located.
Tochilovsky is accused of taking property from the owners in 2010 with the help of local lawyers, who allegedly transferred ownership to offshore companies controlled by him. Yuri Antonev, the owner of one of the buildings, said that Tochilovskiy also stole millions of dollars that his family hid in a hiding place under the house.
According to prosecutors’ documents seen by OCCRP, Tochilovsky is under investigation in four cases of fraudulent misappropriation of property. The materials also include the building where Subrogalia was originally registered.
BioTexCom confirmed that it had provided Subrogalia with a “registered address” but said the company had never operated there. A spokesman for the clinic also denied the accusations against Tochilovsky, noting that he was not found guilty.
The first hearing in the case of one of Tochilovsky’s managers would have taken place in April 2022, if not for the Russian invasion. It is not yet known when the case will go to court.
In 2017, Sanchez opened his own IVF clinic in Ukraine called InterFiv. In 2021, one of the sons of Il Prados became her beneficial owner. A few weeks before Sanchez’s wedding, Ukrainian law enforcement officers searched InterFiv offices in Kyiv.
Law enforcement authorities suspected InterFiv of human trafficking, among other things, the company was accused of handing over other people’s children to parents. In addition, InterFiv allegedly arranged fictitious marriages and forged documents in order to illegally take children out of Ukraine.
Neither Sanchez, nor Il Prados, nor any of their relatives were charged. In February 2022, the court extended the investigation for a year. A week later, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine thwarted the proceedings.
OCCRP police said the investigation is ongoing. A source in the Ukrainian Security Service said they had found evidence to support the allegations and that InterFiv would be prosecuted when the legal system was back up and running. But when that will happen is unclear.
Sanchez and Il Prados abandoned InterFiv and founded a new company, InterEko, to manage the clinic in Kyiv.
But even here there were problems with the law. In November 2022, a representative of Subrogalia in Russia was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for human trafficking. He was found guilty of selling a child abandoned by a Spanish couple to another Spanish woman.
