Two founders of Kinderly Georgia, a reproductive medicine agency, have each been sentenced to ten years in prison after a court found them guilty of embezzling funds from surrogate mothers and biological parents, Georgia’s Prosecutor General’s Office said on June 30.
The office did not name the convicted individuals, but RFE/RL’s Georgian Service, which has long reported on the case, said they are Armenian national Armen Melikyan, who was arrested on October 1, 2025, and Ukrainian Ruslan Timoshenko, who was sentenced in absentia.
The pair were found guilty by the Tbilisi City Court of “misappropriation of a large amount of money by a group by prior agreement using official position,” the Prosecutor General’s Office stated.
Kinderly Georgia, reportedly registered in 2022, acted as an intermediary between biological parents and surrogate mothers, the office said. It added that the defendants signed contracts with prospective parents, promising to find surrogate mothers and ensure the birth of a child through in vitro fertilization.
“In this way, the defendants embezzled large amounts of money from citizens of the Republic of China and, instead of covering the surrogate mothers’ various expenses and the remuneration provided for in the contract, using their official position, collectively appropriated more than GEL 2,060,006.5 [USD 780,500] belonging to both potential parents and surrogate mothers.”
In a March 9 article, RFE/RL’s Georgian Service reported that prosecutors said there were 40 victims in the case, including 30 surrogate mothers and 10 biological parents. The article includes testimonies from surrogate mothers, many of whom are foreign nationals, who said they did not receive the USD 16,000 remuneration promised by the company after giving birth, nor postnatal medical care.
The investigation into the case was reportedly opened in spring 2025 after RFE/RL’s Georgian Service published an extensive piece on the issue, including accounts of surrogate mothers living in a closed hostel near Tbilisi’s Station Square, along the railway tracks. They were reportedly moved there after being evicted from apartments when Kinderly stopped paying rent to landlords.
According to the outlet, the surrogate mothers were mainly from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Russia. Among them were also Georgian women.
Reacting to the guilty verdict, Sapari, a women’s rights organization that represented the victims in the case, said it had urged prosecutors from the outset to pursue trafficking charges. According to the group, some of the women were granted trafficking victim status. However, it described as “problematic” the fact that Kinderly’s managers were ultimately convicted on embezzlement charges rather than human trafficking.
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