Crete fertility clinic trial opens with Australian families among the victims

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A year-long hearing into the Mediterranean Fertility Centre in Chania begins in mid-October, with 26 defendants facing charges that run from fraud and forgery to human trafficking and the sale of genetic material.

The Three-Member Court of Appeal of Crete will sit at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania. Proceedings are under strict anonymity. The clinic was founded more than 30 years ago by obstetrician Ioannis Giakoumakis. Police raided it in August 2023.

Prosecutors say the fraud had two sides. Patients who came for IVF were put through fake procedures. Eggs and sperm taken from them were then used to make embryos for other clients, who paid large sums, in some cases more than €100,000, including for false cohabitation papers meant to skirt Greek law.

Between 2018 and 2023, 298 women attended the clinic. Prosecutors say 272 were misled about egg retrievals and operations later judged to have been staged. Some were medicated as if an embryo had been transferred when no transfer had taken place. The chance of pregnancy was zero. The bills ran into millions of euros.

In the nine months before the raid, the case file lists 71 women used for eggs, 98 women exploited as surrogates, 13 illegal child purchases in the surrogacy programme and four illegal adoptions. Across 2021 to 2023, more than 400 women are said to have undergone intrusive fake IVF. Over five years, 173 donors went through 333 retrievals, and those eggs were sent to 1,226 recipients.

Recruiters in Georgia and Romania were paid more than €5,000 a woman, prosecutors say. The women were offered a few hundred euros a month to carry a pregnancy. Not all knew egg donation was part of the arrangement. One woman in her early twenties had 13 retrievals, with eggs going to 63 recipients. A Chania patient known as Maria believed her eggs were for her own treatment. Police later told her at least half a dozen had been used for others.

The women were held, the prosecution says, in 14 houses around Chania under an alleged trafficker. Those concerns brought the authorities in. A doctor’s secret diary of the real procedures showed how wide the deception went.

Two girls about to turn six are in the file as Baby A and Baby B. A person familiar with the case told The Australian that their biological parents went to the clinic for infertility help and later learned eggs and sperm taken from them had made at least two more embryos, implanted in two surrogates and sold. The parents, the person said, are still horrified.

At least 37 Australian couples and single people were caught up in the raid. Three couples were waiting to register newborns born to surrogates. They had gone to Crete because commercial surrogacy is banned in Australia.

Sam Everingham of Growing Families said some clients had babies during the shutdown, some had failed implants, and some had embryos in storage. At least two couples found no genetic link to their child and did not know the source of the egg or sperm. Others chose not to test. Getting embryos out was slow and expensive. Those who managed it sent them first to another EU country, then on again. He called it traumatic, and still unfinished.

One civil court has already awarded a Greek couple undisclosed damages after seven fake IVF cycles from 2014, plus compensation for moral harm. Dozens of other civil claims are in. In a separate case, a man’s sperm was used without his knowledge on a second egg from the same donor. The children are biological siblings.

A lawyer in the criminal case said many victims will not appear. Court costs are about €2,000, and a year of representation is more than most can pay. In Chania, she said, people expect little to change. Most defendants are on bail. Some are still practising. For the families, she said, the betrayal has not stopped.

Source: Jacquelin Magnay, The Australian

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