Robert A. Belfer
American oilman and philanthropist
Robert Alexander Belfer (born 1935) is an American businessman and philanthropist. He is the namesake of Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
Early life and education
Belfer is the son of American oil industry executive and multimillionaire Arthur Belfer, founder of the Belco Petroleum Corporation, which
became a Fortune 500 company. Robert Belfer was born in Kraków, Poland in 1935 and graduated from Columbia College in 1955 and Harvard Law School in 1958.
Career
After completing law school, Belfer joined the Belco Petroleum Corp. He was elected president in 1960 and was named its chairman in 1985. The company subsequently merged into the Omaha, Nebraska-based InterNorth, Inc., a predecessor to Enron. Belfer was on the Enron board of directors and not involved in the operations of the company. Belfer resigned from the board in June 2002. He was estimated to have held more than 16 million shares in the company which earned him a spot on the Forbes 400.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert A. Belfer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.