Salomón Lerner Ghitis

Salomón Lerner is of Jewish descent.[4] He was born on 4 February 1946.[1] He studied in Anglo-Peruvian School. From 1962 to 1967, he studied industrial engineering with focus on agribusiness at the National University of Engineering (UNI) in Lima. Later he attended post-gradual courses at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico, in 1968, and at the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel, in 1989. As a student, he joined politics and became the chairman of the students' wing of the social-democratic APRA party.[1]

Under the left-wing military administration of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75), he was general manager of the Public Fish-Meal and Oil Marketing Enterprise (EPCHAP). In the government of Velasco's successor, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, Lerner was vice minister of foreign trade. In 1997, he managed CPN Radio channel, and from October 1997 to March 1998, he was a member of the board of Frecuencia Latina. At the end of the 1990s, he served as the CEO of the Banco del Progreso. When the NBK bank acquired Banco del Progreso in 2000, he stayed CEO of the merged bank, until his resignation during the crisis in July of that year.

Other functions performed by Salomón Lerner include manager of Helicópteros del Sur, Tecal S.A., and the Cotton Corporation of Peru, president of the Institute for Economic and Social Development (Indes), and the industrial engineers' chapter in the Association of Peruvian Engineers (CIP).[1]

In 2001, Lerner was general coordinator of the Civil Association Transparencia which observed the 2001 general elections. Afterwards he became a member of the editorial board of the daily newspaper La República.[1] He also managed the campaign of left-wing nationalist Ollanta Humala for both the 2006 and the 2011 presidential election.[5]