Thomas Bata, owner of global shoe corporation, a house hold name in India that bears his name, died in Toronto at age 93.
A spokesperson of Bata Shoe Museum, said Bata died early yesterday morning in Sunnybrook Hospital only weeks before his 94th birthday.
She did not give cause of his death. She said a company statement will be issued later. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
Bata is survived by his wife, Sonja, a son and three daughters.
Bata came to Canada to make his mark, he had said some years ago. "I wanted to do something where I could say OK, now this enterprise I built on my own. Canada was the one country that I selected for this experiment."
By 1940, the Batawa plant was in business. And after 1945, when the Czech factories were nationalised by the Communists, the company headquarters was relocated to Toronto under Bata's leadership. Toronto is home to the Bata Shoe Museum, a four-storey structure with 10,000 shoes.
The company returned to the Czech Republic in 1989, after the Communist regime ended, nearly 100 years after the company was founded in 1894.
Thomas G Bata, a grandson of the founder, became chairman of the business in 2001.
Bata's father, Tomas, a ninth generation cobbler, founded the shoe empire in Zlin in 1894, which later swelled into the giant Bata Shoe Organisation. Thomas Bata ran the shoe company from the 1940s into the 1980s.
"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," Klaus said.
Born September 17, 1914, in Czechoslovakia, Thomas Bata's life was buffeted by the worst horrors of the 20th century.
He exiled himself in Canada in 1938 when the rise of Nazism forced him to flee his homeland. Seven years later, having served with the Canadian army on the battlefields, he returned to his freshly liberated birthplace, but not for long.
When the communists took over the country after the WW-II, they seized his factory and declared Bata a capitalist evil.
"I found it very sad," Bata said in an interview in 2005, "because what we thought was liberation really became a dictatorship of the communists."
The regime gave the company a new name and it went on making shoes, but it was Bata, headquartered in Toronto that remained a byword for shoes.
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."
It took 40 years, but vindication finally came in 1989. As Eastern European communist dictatorships collapsed one by one, 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.
Havel awarded him the country's top decoration, the Tomas Garrigue Masaryk Order, in 1991, and he also received high Slovak and Canadian decorations. He last visited the Czech Republic in June.
Besides his business activities, Bata also served as chairman of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's business and advisory committee on non-members.
His son Thomas George Bata took over the shoe company from him in 2001.