TORONTO – Thomas Bata, the patriarch of one of the world’s largest family-owned business empires, died in a Toronto hospital Monday. He was 93.
Bata, who fled to Canada ahead of the Nazi invasion of his native Czechoslovakia in 1939, ran the shoe-manufacturing company that bears his family name out of its Toronto headquarters for more than four decades overseeing its growth into a multinational organization that serves more than a million customers a day.
A spokesman for the company said Bata died early Monday morning at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, just two weeks before his 94th birthday.
Leslie Tenenbaum, lawyer for the company, did not give a cause of death and said that funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
Bata is survived by his wife, Sonja, a son and three daughters.
“One of the greatest personalities of our time has left,” Czech President Vaclav Klaus said in a statement. “Despite ill fortune in his homeland, he managed to succeed in the world and became for us a symbol of business success. We will all miss him.”
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The empire was originally founded in 1894 by Bata’s father Tomas, a ninth-generation cobbler, in the town of Zlin, about 300 kilometres east of Prague.
Tomas Bata died in a plane crash in 1932. Six years later, his son moved to Canada when the rise of Nazism forced him to flee his homeland.
After serving with the Canadian army during the Second World War, he returned to his newly liberated homeland at war’s end only to find himself persona non grata with the Soviet-installed communist government.
The communists seized his factory and declared Bata an evil capitalist.
“What we thought was liberation really became a dictatorship of the communists,” Bata told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview.
Bata Shoes carried on making shoes, but from its Canadian headquarters.
Under Bata’s control it would later swell into the giant Bata Shoe Organization, operating more than 5,000 retail stores in more than 50 countries.
Bata Shoe Ltd. also operates 40 production facilities in 25 counties and employs more than 40,000 people.
He ran the shoe company from the 1940s into the 1980s, but retired from active participation in the company in 2001. His son Thomas G. Bata became chairman in 2001, but Bata self-deprecatingly described himself as the “interfering patriarch.”
During the Cold War, Bata broadcast support to the dissident movement on Radio Free Europe and offered his business as a vision of what could be: “So that people would see that the democratic system, based on democratic economy, would be the most advantageous for them.”
In 1989, after the Czech communist government fell, Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident leader and playwright turned president, asked Bata to come back.
“Vaclav Havel sent me a message through my wife and said, “˜Tom should come as soon as he can,’” Bata recalled.
Cheering crowds greeted him at the airport in Prague on his arrival and Havel awarded him the country’s top decoration.
Besides his business activities, Bata also served as chairman of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s business and advisory committee on non-members.
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