A prominent surrogacy agency in Europe is under investigation following accusations that its pedophile owner sexually assaulted an employee. José María Hill Prados, 63, is being accused of forcing a young employee to perform sexual acts as part of his employment with Gestlife.
Gestlife is one of the largest surrogacy firms in Europe, operating offices in 11 countries dedicated to facilitating child exchange contracts. On its site, it boasts that it has helped “2100 children be born,” and that over 55% of its clientele are “LGBTQIA+ couples.” But authorities in Barcelona are now investigating the company after an employee came forward to accuse the owner of sexual assault.
According to the complaint, the 20-year-old victim, who will be referred to as Alejandro, was in a precarious financial situation when he came upon a job advertisement on Instagram which promised regular work with a stable income. His confidence was bolstered by the fact that he knew the job offer to have associations in the “gay world.”
Interested in applying for the position, Alejandro responded to the advertisement and was connected with a man named “Albert,” who was in fact Gestlife’s owner, José María Hill Prados, using a false name. The two began chatting over Telegram via messages which automatically set to be deleted after 60 seconds.
During their conversation, Prados, as “Albert,” offered Alejandro employment “in exchange for him maintaining a sexual relationship with the head of the company,” referring to himself. Because Alejandro was struggling to make ends meet, and the salary far exceeded his current compensation, he accepted the job.
At the time, in April 2021, Alejandro did not have many friends, and similarly lacked a strong relationship with family members, making him particularly vulnerable to influence.
Alejandro was then scheduled for another interview with Prados, this time in person, who once again took on a fake identity of “Diego.” Under the false identity, Prados questioned Alejandro about his sexual interests and if he would be “willing to let himself be penetrated.” Prados also stated that the victim must agree to sexual intercourse once a week.
However, over time, the situation worsened. Prados took Alejandro to his home in Premià de Dalt, Barcelona, where he sexually assaulted the young man in order to “verify” that the nature of his employment contract was “understood.” Prados then contracted Alejandro as an office worker for Gestlife.
Prado’s demands for “sexual favors” quickly became constant, and Alejandro was forced to endure being raped by the convicted pedophile several times a week while also being threatened by him. In his legal complaint, Alejandro states that he was raped by Prados repeatedly, even after he asked him to stop, and that the surrogacy business owner would, at times, refuse to wear a condom.
Though Prados continued to use the fake identity of “Diego,” Alejandro soon discovered his real name, and learned that Prados had previously been sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually abusing two children, and for creating illicit pornography of the acts he subjected them to.
As previously reported by Reduxx, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a Paris-based consortium of investigative journalists, exposed Prados as a serial child sexual abuser who, before entering the surrogacy industry, founded a Russian children’s foster organization called Padres para Siempre (Parents forever).
In 1996, Prados, who was 36 at the time, was investigated by a Barcelona court for the 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. However, 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.
But soon afterwards, in 2007, Prados was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually abusing two children at the Casal Dels Infants del Raval center for minors in Barcelona. Prados was alleged to have exposed the children to pornographic films in order to groom them at his home in Cervelló, Spain, where he also sexually assaulted them. Prados was convicted of raping both of the children and for creating pornography of the assaults.
During court proceedings, it was alleged that there were more than 30 children who had been victims of rape and sexual abuse at the hands of Prados and nearly a dozen other men while he worked at the Casal Dels Infants del Raval. A total of 13 individuals were arrested in addition to Prados. It has come to be known as one of the most shocking modern pedophilia scandals in Barcelona.
The sentence was ultimately anonymized, with Prados’ identity being obscured as ‘Carlos Jesús’ by the court. However, his identity, along with the identity of one of the child victims, was later revealed after the boy came forward to recant his allegations and claim that he was pressured into making the accusations. But the judge disagreed, finding that there was sufficient evidence to sustain the conviction. Prados would go on to serve his full prison sentence.
In 2015, Prados set up a surrogacy company called Subrogalia based in Spain, according to corporate records. The company, one of over a dozen currently owned by Prados, was quickly mired in controversy and allegations of child trafficking.
Prados’ business partner in the ventures is Didac Giménez Sánchez, who has been revealed to have been one of the child victims Prados had been convicted of raping in 2007.
The OCCRP 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.
Subrogalia has operations in as many as nine countries, according to the OCCRP, 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.
Before the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, the Eastern European nation earned a reputation as an international hub for the sale of babies through surrogacy contracts. The industry has been known to target women who are struggling financially, offering them payments of approximately $11,000 for a healthy baby – more than three times the average yearly salary in Ukraine.
In order to distance the company from the litigation, Subrogalia Ukraine rebranded as Eurosurrogacy in 2017. Concurrently, Subrogalia Spain was renamed to Gestlife.
Prados’ enterprises have a specific focus on providing gay men children, and Gestlife boasts that the majority of its clients are gay couples and single men.
“More than 55% of our parents are single men, gay couples, or single gay men, who, at a certain point in their lives, have received the call of parenthood. Surrogacy for gay couples, or for single men, is the best way to achieve parenthood, due to the practical impossibility of a successful international adoption process. The number of surrogacy cases in Spain has, in the last two years, surpassed the number of international adoptions,” reads Gestlife’s website on a page aimed at “LGBT” customers.
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.
Earlier this month, Reduxx received a legal threat via email ostensibly sent on behalf of Diego Sánchez Giménez, the alias of Didac Giménez Sánchez, Prados’ victim and business partner. The email demanded the full retraction of Reduxx‘s article naming Prados and Sánchez.
“The content of the article links my client to criminal activities, specifically child trafficking, document forgery and fake marriages, in an unfounded and gravely defamatory manner, causing irreparable harm. These allegations are entirely false, lack evidentiary support, and have been refuted in various judicial instances,” read the email, which was signed Alvaro Rocha.
But while claiming to be a communications from “legal counsel”, the email was sent from a business address linked to a company known as iData Protection. Reduxx discovered that Prados had recently renamed his criminal online reputation enterprise Eliminalia to iData Protection – meaning that the legal threat demanding the removal of incriminating information about his various corporations had come directly from Prados himself.
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