The man named by Nathaniel Rothschild as his witness to the events on Mr Deripaska’s boat is a 52-year-old American banker with impeccable Wall Street credentials.

James Goodwin who was born in Pennsylvania, began his financial career at Arthur Andersen, the management consultants, in 1978, fresh out of Virginia Tech where he studied accountancy. After getting an MBA from Stanford University, Mr Goodwin, who is widowed, joined Morgan Stanley in 1984 and stayed until 1989. He moved to become a managing director at Gleacher & Co, a small investment bank that was bought by Natwest in 1995. During his time at Gleacher he also took a posting in the White House as special adviser to Thomas McLarty, the White House Chief of Staff, in 1993.

From the late 1990s, Mr Goodwin began working for himself. He joined the board of several companies and founded his own investment management company called Half Moon. He has very public links to Russian business. Earlier this month, Rusal, the Russian aluminium giant, chose Mr Goodwin, among others, to be a director of a company called Norilskii Nikel, in which Rusal hold a 25 per cent stake. Oleg Deripaska, the Russian billionaire, is one of Rusal’s controlling shareholders.

Mr Goodwin, if elected, would be in good company with other equally respectable directors — Rusal also recommended that Luca di Montezemolo, the president of Ferrari, sit on the board.

Mr Goodwin was married to the late Hope Babette Tang, a pediatrician who practiced in New York. His Catholic wedding in New York in 1990 was a sufficiently grand affair to warrant a large notice in the New York Times. In it, it reveals that Mr Goodwin's father used to work for Textron, the weapons to aerospace group, in one division in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. His late wife, known as Babette, was also the daughter of the New York businessman Hamburg Tang, who owned his own manufacturing firm.

The couple have a teenage son, Gordon Tang Goodwin. Mr Goodwin Sr now serves on the Pediatric Advisory Committee at Columbia University Medical Centre and also helps run a trust for his son, called the Gordon Tang Goodwin Trust, whose address is the Half Moon offices.

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