A federal grand jury today charged Margaret Cole, Robin Langoria, and other employees of European Adoption Consultants (EAC) with fraud, money laundering and bribery in connections with adoptions from Uganda and Poland.
EAC had been granted accreditation under the Hague Convention for Inter-Country Adoptions by the Council on Accreditation. That accreditation is considered a sort of gold standard in the realm of international adoption agencies: it involves a substantial amount of time and work and fees to receive.
In 2015, EAC had a complaint lodged against it for a case in China. In December 2016, the State Department debarred EAC, and their Hague accreditation status was revoked. The IAMME website (IAMME became the sole Hague Convention accreditor in 2018) states this: “Nature of the Substantiated Violations: The Department of State temporarily debarred adoption service provider, European Adoption Consultants, Inc. (EAC) from accreditation on December 16, 2016, for a period of three years. As a result of this temporary debarment, EAC’s accreditation has been cancelled and it must immediately cease to provide all adoption services in connection with intercountry adoptions.
The Department found substantial evidence that the agency is out of compliance with the standards in subpart F of the accreditation regulations, and evidence of a pattern of serious, willful, or grossly negligent failure to comply with the standards and of aggravating circumstances indicating that continued accreditation of EAC would not be in the best interests of the children and families concerned.”
The FBI raided EAC in 2017, and the agency closed. Cole had founded EAC in 1991.
Grand jury documents were unsealed today in Ohio, where EAC was located. EAC had worked in adoptions in Bulgaria, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Honduras, India, Panama, Tanzania, and Ukraine, in addition to Uganda and Poland.
It’s impossible to know how much heartache has happened to families and children as a result of this.
Here is the full article from Cleveland.com.
If you did not adopt through EAC, I am guessing you’ve contacted your agency for assistance. There are many resources available for residential treatment, and I know they can be extremely expensive. Most have staff that can give you information about options. I know all of this is probably not useful for you, and I am sorry not to be more helpful. I have no expertise in this. I will give it some more thought and will try to provide more information. Take good care.
I don’t know what recourse you might have, and I know this must be a painful road for you. If you also adopted through European Adoption Consultants, maybe you want to talk with the Department of Justice. When they announced the indictment, the press release included a request for victims to contact them. Here is the link to the press release, which includes contact information for victims: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-individuals-charged-arranging-adoptions-uganda-and-poland-through-bribery-and-fraud
I see this article is 2 years old. We are sadly victims of a fraudulent adoption of a child from Honduras that must have occurred just before the EAC’s closing in 2017. Our daughter now 15 has been diagnosed with severe personality disorder and will require life long medication, therapy and recommended internment in a residential facility. We are looking for a way to get her into such care at no cost to us. If you learned anything regarding assistance for parents in our situation, please let us know. Thanks. David and Sue Moss
I am so sorry to hear of your daughter’s fraudulent adoption and her subsequent struggles. Yes, this article is two years old, but there have been several updates, the most recent one May 19: https://lightofdaystories.com/tag/margaret-cole/
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