A Moscow diploma, two border crossings in six years, three patient complaints: the Kostanay plastic surgery trial and the verdict of 27 December 2024

Kazakhstan licenses private clinics and certifies its doctors, but a diploma presented as coming from a Russian university is not easy for a patient, an employer or even a regulator to check quickly. The plastic surgery case tried in Kostanay through 2024 shows how a woman whose medical education nobody could confirm kept operating after her own company lost its licence, and what a criminal court could and could not do about it.

According to Kostanayskie Novosti, reporting from Court No. 2 in Kostanay on 15 August 2024, the indictment accused Irina Gromova, 49, of performing plastic surgeries unlawfully at a private clinic, with the clinic's owner, a 37-year-old licensed traumatologist-orthopaedist, sometimes assisting and sometimes correcting the results. Gromova's own company, Masterskaya Preobrazheniya, had lost its licence in 2022 after an inspection found the licence had been obtained with forged documents; she was held administratively liable, and the operations continued at TOO Erlan-Med, which rented premises from her. Three patients, one a minor, were recognised as victims. The newspaper Vremya wrote on 3 July 2024 that Gromova had posted diplomas, certificates and licences on social media to reassure clients, and described the scars and deformities its patients reported.

The diploma was at the heart of the trial. According to Kostanayskie Novosti, the document Gromova submitted purported to come from a Moscow institute of medico-social rehabilitology, with graduation in 2006; the institute no longer exists, and a request to the Russian education ministry had gone unanswered. At the 2022 inspection she had produced a diploma from a Samara university, which replied to a lawyer's inquiry that no such student had ever been enrolled. A forensic examination found the seal had been made by a photopolymer method, and the judge granted a motion for the prosecution to ask the border service for her crossings between 2000 and 2006.

At the verdict on 27 December 2024, reported by Kostanayskie Novosti, Judge Anara Shaimurunova acquitted the clinic owner and found Gromova guilty under Article 322 of illegal medical activity causing medium harm to two patients, but released her from criminal liability because the one-year limitation period for acts committed in 2022 had expired. She must pay each of the two victims 3 million tenge in moral damages. The judge issued two private rulings asking the authorities to verify the diplomas, noting that border records showed only two crossings in the claimed study period, one of them a two-day trip to Chelyabinsk, and that a ban on practising could follow only once the diploma was confirmed fake.

The failure was that nobody with the power to stop her checked the diploma at its source until a criminal court did, by which time the limitation clock had run out. For students and families the lesson is to verify a qualification with the issuing university before trusting a practitioner or an employer, and never to let certificates on a wall or a social media feed stand in for an entry in the regulator's register.