Motaev Vyacheslav

Biography

2022: Sentence - prison term for fraud

In November 2022, the Central District Court of Kaliningrad sentenced the founder and general director of SB-Consulting Vyacheslav Motaev to imprisonment for 1 year and 10 months in a general regime colony. He was found guilty of major fraud (Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) when concluding an agreement under the surrogacy program.

The court found that after the birth of the child, Vyacheslav Motaev demanded that a German citizen transfer an additional 4.5 thousand euros for performing a cesarean section of a surrogate mother, which was not actually performed, and refused to provide the parents with documents confirming the operation, citing the impossibility of obtaining such documents due to the "insurmountable level of bureaucracy in Russia."

The head of the surrogacy agency in Kaliningrad was sentenced to prison for fraud

According to the investigation, Motaev knew that the suragate mother did not have evidence for the operation. In addition, he took advantage of the fact that potential parents do not speak Russian, and deliberately, as the investigation proved, performed an inaccurate translation of the surrogate mother's medical documents. In documentation provided to prospective parents, Motaev indicated the "transverse" position of the fetus in the uterus, although the original documents indicated the "longitudinal position of the fetus" (is the norm).

At the end of November 2022, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said that in early December 2022, a decision would be made to ban the services of surrogate mothers in Russia for foreign citizens. The Chairman of the State Duma stressed that child trafficking is unacceptable. According to him, over the past few years, "45 thousand babies born by surrogate mothers" have been exported abroad.

This is a large illegal business, the turnover of which is estimated at more than 2 billion euros. Such kids often find themselves in difficult situations: they become victims of crimes, including sales to organs, fall into same-sex couples, he said.