Karan has married twice and has four children (Navena, Oliver, Jessica and Niclas).[4][12] He is a Christian.[13]
Career
Karan joined Schenker & Co. Ltd, London, a shipping and forwarding subsidiary of a German conglomerate Schenker AG, in 1966 as a management trainee.[4][8][14] In 1969 he moved to Switzerland, working as a clerk for the container firm Crowe & Co in Basel.[5][14] He then moved to Hamburg in 1970, working as a dishwasher at a vegetarian restaurant.[4][8][14] After three months he joined the Max Grünhut shipping company as a clerk.[4][8][14] He was promoted to departmental manager a year later.[4][8] He then entered the container business, working as managing director of Lyons Container (Hamburg) and NIC Lease Ltd (Chicago).[5][14] He went into business on his own in 1975, setting up Container Leasing Agency which served as an agent for his former employer.[1][4] In 1977 his company, which was now building containers and leasing them, changed its name to CLOU (Container Leasing Company).[4] He sold his company to an Anglo-American competitor in 1993.[4][8]
After observing a three-year non-compete clause, Karan re-entered the container leasing business in 1996, establishing Capital Lease GmbH in Hamburg.[4][8][15] The company, whose worldwide operations were based in Hong Kong, became the fastest growing container leasing company in the world and after four years it became the largest leasing company in Europe.[4] The company was reportedly worth US$400 million.[5][8] Karan was nicknamed "container king".[4][5][8] The highly profit-making company became the seventh largest container company in the world with over 520,000 TEUs.[4] Karan sold Capital Lease to two banks just before the financial crash.[4]
Karan established the Ian Karan Auditorium in the Bucerius Kunst Forum and an auditorium for medical students at the University of Hamburg.[4][8] He was chairman of the board of trustees of the Hamburg Theatre Festival and is a member of the supervisory board of Hamburger SV.[4][8][17] He was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in June 2007 for his social and cultural work.[4][8][17] Karan was a British citizen for over forty years before taking up German citizenship in December 2009, allegedly on the recommendations of German ChancellorAngela Merkel.[4][8][17] Karan later admitted that Merkel never made such a recommendation.[11]
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