Reuven Brenner

Reuven Brenner is a professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill, a member of the Board of the McGill Pension Fund and a member of its investment committee.

He worked at Bank of America, Universo Conocimiento, EEN, Bell Canada, in companies and with investors in Canada, Mexico, the U.S. and Europe. He has been involved in the private equity markets as a partner in the Strategic Partners Party, has been a promoter of investment and business creation in Canada, as part of a “group of angels”, and also created his own startup, “e-mortal.com”. He has also been serving on the boards of companies and institutions.

He was an expert witness in cases covering antitrust, bankruptcy and financial matters. In other areas, the Government of Quebec asked him in 1995 to be a member of a commission whose mandate was to examine all aspects of the possible separation of Quebec. He was also proposed to testify before congressional committees and the Canadian Senate Committee on Banking and Finance, and worked with Poland’s central bank during the recent crisis.

His most recent books are A World of Chance (2008) and The Force of Finance (2002). His regular columns appeared in Forbes magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Asia Times and other financial press around the world. Brenner also received the Killam Award (1992), was elected a Fellow by the Royal Society (1999), and received a Fulbright Grant (1976). In February 2013, he was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his contributions to his peers, to his community, and to Canada.

Brenner was born in Romania and immigrated to Israel in 1962. He served in the Israeli army from 1966 to 1969, during the Six-Day War, and again during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Fulbright scholarship took him in 1977 to Chicago, after completing his doctorate at the Hebrew University and working at the Bank of Israel, where he received the First Prize of Israeli Banks (for work with Saul Bronfeld, designing indexed securities). He has been living in Canada since 1980. He is fluent in English, French, Hebrew and Hungarian.