Kinderly Georgia Founders Sentenced to 10 Years for Embezzling Surrogacy Funds
By Messenger Staff
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
Two founders of Kinderly Georgia, a reproductive medicine agency, have been sentenced to ten years in prison each after being found guilty of embezzling money from surrogate mothers and biological parents, Georgia's Prosecutor General's Office announced on June 30.
The office withheld the names of the convicted men; however, RFE/RL's Georgian Service, which has followed the case closely, identified them as Armenian national Armen Melikyan, detained on October 1, 2025, and Ukrainian national Ruslan Timoshenko, who was tried and convicted in absentia.
A Tbilisi City Court panel convicted the two of misappropriating large sums of money as part of a group acting by prior agreement and abusing an official position, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Kinderly Georgia, which was registered in 2022, served as a go-between for biological parents and surrogate mothers. The company's founders signed agreements with hopeful parents pledging to arrange surrogate mothers and deliver a child through IVF.
"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 belonging to both potential parents and surrogate mothers," the Prosecutor General's Office said in its statement.
In a March 9 report, RFE/RL's Georgian Service cited prosecutors as saying the case involved 40 victims, 30 of them surrogate mothers and 10 biological parents. The outlet spoke with several surrogate mothers, mostly foreign nationals, who described never being paid the USD 16,000 fee the company had promised them after delivery, and said they also went without the postnatal care they had been guaranteed.
Authorities reportedly launched the investigation in spring 2025, shortly after RFE/RL's Georgian Service published a detailed investigation into the company's practices. The report described surrogate mothers living in a locked hostel near Tbilisi's Station Square, by the railway tracks, after Kinderly allegedly stopped paying their rent, forcing them out of their apartments.
The outlet found that most of the surrogate mothers had come from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Russia, with a smaller number of Georgian women also among them.
Sapari, a women's rights group that represented the victims, said it had urged prosecutors from the outset to pursue trafficking charges instead. The organization noted that several of the women had already been recognized as trafficking victims and called it "problematic" that the Kinderly founders were convicted of embezzlement rather than trafficking in human beings.
