Michael Kadoorie

Origins and early life

Sir Michael David Kadoorie (born 1941), son of Lawrence Kadoorie and grandson of Elly Kadoorie, was born in Hong Kong into the Baghdadi Jewish Kadoorie family and educated at Kowloon Junior School and at Le Rosey in Switzerland.

Work and career

He is chairman of CLP Holdings, the utility his family came to control, which supplies electricity to three quarters of Hong Kong as the sole operator in Kowloon and the New Territories and holds interests in power stations in mainland China, Australia, India and Southeast Asia. He is also chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, owners of the Peninsula group. France made him an Officer of the Legion of Honour and Belgium a Commander of the Order of Leopold II; he was knighted in 2005 and the University of Hong Kong, whose council he sat on, gave him an honorary doctorate in 2004 and opened the Kadoorie Biological Sciences Building in 2000.

Through the Kadoorie Charitable Foundation, of which he is a trustee, the family endowed at Oxford two chairs - in trauma rehabilitation and in emergency medicine - and the Kadoorie Centre for Critical Care Research and Education at the John Radcliffe Hospital.