July 16, 2012
By Jaya Narain, Daily Mail
He earns £120,000 a week, likes to drink vintage champagne straight from the bottle and once famously put hundreds of pounds on to a church collection plate.
But Mario Balotelli’s generosity doesn’t appear to extend to his mother, who works as a cleaner in an office only a few miles from her son’s £3million mansion.
While the Manchester City footballer glides around in his gleaming £120,000 Bentley Continental GT, Rose Barwuah has a more humble mode of transport – the number 11 bus.
Five times a week, she catches the bus to start her job as a cleaner at a car lease firm on the outskirts of Cheadle, near Manchester, earning little more than the minimum wage of £6.08 an hour.
Home for her is a council home in Wythenshawe, the area used to film Shameless, the Channel 4 comedy about feckless families living on benefits.
The 46-year-old gave Balotelli up for adoption when he was two, and she and her husband were living in poverty in a tiny flat in Brescia, Italy.
Last Christmas she moved to the Manchester area to be near her notoriously eccentric son, now 21.
A source said: ‘When she came over from Italy with her daughter, Rose, she said she wanted to be close to her son and didn’t want any of the huge wealth or luxury he now enjoys.