Germán Efromovich

Germán Efromovich (born 28 March 1950 in La Paz) is a Bolivian-born entrepreneur with multiple citizenship: Brazilian, Colombian, and Polish. He was born into a family of Polish Jews.

His family is originally from Poland. Looking for a new home after World War II, his parents left Poland for South America, first to Bolivia, where he was born, and later to Chile, where Germán Efromovich was raised from 1955 in Arica and then from 1964 in São Paulo, Brazil. After schooling he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from FEI University in Brazil. His career includes selling encyclopedias, dubbing Mexican movies into Portuguese and the ownership of a school in São Bernardo do Campo, where in the 1980s he taught a union leader named Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who later became President of Brazil.

However, the oil sector laid the foundation for what evolved into the Synergy Group. To build his oil and aviation empire Efromovich bought Avianca, Colombia's national airline, in 2004, for US$ 64 Mio, plus the assumption of US$ 220 Mio in debt and leasing liabilities. Initially performing only nondestructive testing for the Brazilian-government-run oil company, Petrobras, Efromovich developed more business to the point of building and leasing oil rigs. His other businesses include power plants, shipyards and products for the medical industry.

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