19/12/2022
Greetings! Face Friends, here's our latest…It’s an EPIC tale.
We traced a cut-price surrogacy tourism agency across four continents, unpicking how it circumvents anti-exploitation laws to match desperate would-be parents with surrogates (including many poor, vulnerable single mums).
The agency, called New Life, says it arranges 80-100 embryo transfers a month to surrogate women around the world. Among its busiest branches are Mexico and Georgia — it also previously operated in Ukraine, Kenya, Cambodia, Thailand, Nepal and elsewhere.
At the heart of the New Life, is a UK shell company called New Life Global Networks LLP (NLGN).
It is owned by two nominee companies in the Marshall Islands (a Pacific Ocean secrecy haven), and its ultimate owner – on paper – was a Georgian called Irakli Khvichia.
We tracked Khvichia down. He's a former airport driver & logistics manager with a conviction for manufacture of synthetic street drug Alpha-PVP (aka Flakka). He didn’t have many answers when we asked him whether he was a senior boss/owner at New Life.
Five days after we confronted Khvichia in a Tbilisi street, NLGN filed an update on Companies House, the UK company registry. Khvichia, it said, was no longer the ultimate owner of NLGN.
So why is NLGN important? We went undercover to find out. When we posed as potential New Life customers, we were sent draft contracts we would have to sign. To be matched with a surrogate in Mexico, the contract said, we must pay $4,500 to NLGN’s bank account.
We showed the contract and other findings about New Life’s marketing activities in the UK to several legal experts. They all said it looked like the agency was breaking British laws that ban for-profit surrogacy agencies from marketing, promoting and negotiating their services in the UK.
As well as paid-for surrogacy, New Life have offered clients other extra services, unlawful or discouraged in some countries. These including picking the s*x of your child (for non-medical reasons) and multiple embryo transfers.
If things don’t go to plan, New Life again had options for customers: until 2015, its Ukrainian website advertised that newborns with genetic abnormalities could lawfully be abandoned by commissioning parents at a local orphanage.
So who really does own New Life? The face of the agency is its “co-founder” Mariam Kukunashvili, a Georgian woman who lives a conspicuously luxurious lifestyle, according to her many Instagram posts. And it was her husband who recently replaced Khvichia as the owner of NLGN.
New Life told reporters it always acted within the law, everywhere it operated. New Life "have always been proud of helping thousands of childless couples to achieve their goals... We have also assisted many people to overcome poverty." It no longer does multiple embryo transfers.
Our investigation involved months of collaborative work by amazing reporters at iFact in Georgia, Eesti Päevaleht in Estonia, Animal Politico in Mexico as well as freelancers Naipanoi Lepapa in Kenya and Vicheika Kann in Cambodia. It also went out with the UK's Observer.
Grab a coffee, make yourself comfy and dive into our tale. Let us know what you think and feel free to share it:
