Business and Personal Life
Kaladze was born in Samtredia, a Georgian town near the Black Sea. His father, Karlo, was a footballer for Lokomotiv Samtredia and was also president of the team at some point. At the age of 11, he played for his town's junior team. Kaladze is the owner of a restaurant called Giannino, founded in 1899 by Giannino Bindi, which is based in Milan. The restaurant has had a Michelin star under Davide Oldani.
In 2001, Kaladze's brother Levan, a medical student, was kidnapped in Georgia, with a ransom of $600,000 demanded. Georgia's president at the time, Eduard Shevardnadze promised "everything is being done to locate him", despite this the only time that Levan was ever seen was in a video where he was shown blindfolded and begging for help. Following the kidnapping, Kaladze threatened to take up Ukrainian citizenship, but reverted his decision stating, "There was a time when I thought about quitting the national side completely, but I couldn’t do it out of respect for the Georgian people and the fans who come and give us such support." Roughly four years later, on 6 May 2005, Georgian police officers found eight dead bodies in the Svaneti region and it was speculated that Levan was among the dead. 21 February 2006 was the date when Levan was officially identified among the deceased, after tests from FBI experts. The local media claimed that the ransom was paid by Kaladze's family although another source says that Kaladze's father attempted to meet the kidnappers, who fled as they believed he was followed by the police. Two men were sentenced to prison for the murder; David Asatiani for 25 years and Merab Amisulashvili for five years. On 14 July 2009, Kaladze's wife Anouki gave birth to their first born son in Milan. The couple named their son Levan, in memory of Kaladze's brother.
Along with his football career, Kaladze is also a successful businessman with investments in Georgia, Italy, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Another investment was the establishment of Kala Capital—a holding company which plans to target banking, real estate and energy sectors of the Georgian economy. Kaladze has also been active in charitable causes and is a FIFA ambassador for the SOS Children's Villages. In 2008, Kaladze founded the Kala Foundation, an organisation that focuses on the "ethical purpose of dedicating all efforts particularly in helping and sustaining people in need". Through the Kala Foundation, he raised €50,000 to benefit South Ossetian refugees during the conflict with Russia in 2008. Kaladze also plans to release an autobiography with the proceeds going to the Kala Foundation.
Read more about this topic: Kakha Kaladze
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, business, personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.”
—John Webster (c. 1580–1638)