Goldwater family
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The Goldwater family, a prominent family in Belhavian politics, business and society, and other professions, is most known for being the owners of the well-known and large Belhavian chemical company, Trans-Taverian Chemical Company, and its key role in the Roth corporate empire. The family is also known as being powerful social elites in Belhavia and throughout Taveria.
History
Notable Members
Yosef Goldwater (b. 1842 - d. 1913) - The founder of the Goldwater family, Yosef grew up poor in industrial Tel Nafesh, Belhavia, in the 1840s. By the 1860s, he had self-taught himself enough business knowledge and built-up his skill that he opened a gunpowder factory before age thirty. For several years the company flourished, and he began to see doors up in the established elites of the city to become known as a young and ambitious financier himself. In 1872, the company went bankrupt and Yosef left for Dakos.
There, for most of the 1870s, he operated a successful maritime shipbuilding yard. This, too, went under after the bloody 1877 Dakos Dock Workers' Revolt. His young family was suffering from his chronic absence, and he became a director on the board of directors for Frankel & Sons Industrial and Petrochemicals Corporation. From 1879 until 1902, he would stay with Frankel & Sons and slowly and meticulously studied the chemical industry.
In 1902, he left Frankel & Sons and created his own company, Trans-Taverian Chemical Company. By the time he passed in 1913, the company was making over $3 million in profits and sold over 50 chemical products.
Benjamin Goldwater (b. 1932 - d. 2000) - Benjamin was the grand-nephew of Yosef. He was born in the early 1930s Raffenburg, Belhavia. Bold, ambitious, and a risk-taker, Benjamin sailed through school with good grades but focused on athletics. He would enlist as a cadet at the elite Freeport Military Academy to become Imperial military officer. He had a knack for strategy and tactics.
After he graduated in 1954, he served four years in the Imperial Army without active deployment and was honorably discharged. He joined as a company manager at Trans-Taverian, handling sales and acquisitions. Less than two years after joining his family business, he was recalled to active duty as an Imperial Army reservist during the South Akkadiya Ocean War, though he did not see combat.
After several years, he grew bored of company life and ran for the open Senate seat in 1964. A wealthy scion and war veteran, his form of conservative Liberal Democratic politics was a good fit for the province of Raffen. After he was elected, he joined the so-called "Conservative coalition" of Tories and right-wing blue-province Lib Dems to support President Edward Kalian in rollbacking the welfare state measures enacted in the previous decade, though this was only partially successful.
He easily won re-election in 1968, and became a top internal critic of President Vern Callan's strong liberalism within his own party in the late 1960s and 1970s. He was a key member of the April 1979 failed bipartisan tax revolt in the Senate.
After he narrowly won re-election in 1980 amid the Tory landslide of the Settas Revolution, Goldwater seriously re-evaluated his politics and found that he was too uncomfortable remaning a Liberal Democrat, and that he was ideologically and philosophically more in-line with the Tories, a nagging realization he had had since the 1960s but never acted upon. In January 1981, before the new Senate was seated, Goldwater switched parties and became a Conservative. He would became a close friend and Senate ally of President Julian Settas.
One of his last famous political acts was shepherding through the Counter-Narcotics Enforcement Act of 1982, which narrowly passed after a contentious second floor vote in the Senate.
He would serve another 4 terms, retiring after his last term ended in January 1997. He passed away from cancer in late 2000.
David Goldwater (born 1970) - The current CEO of the family business and the great-grandson of Yosef, David (sometimes styled in Yiddish formulation as Dovid) is a well-known and respected Belhavian industrialist and world chemical industry leader. Born into a wealthy and elite family, David attended the best yeshivos for education and attended Imperial Provisa University and its graduate business school for his MBA.
He would join the family business in 1993, and was appointed as a plant manager in Bariya, then a major site of Trans-Taverian operations as a potent source of raw resources for its chemical products. During the 1993 collapse of the pro-business military junta for a far-left dictatorship, David and other company employees barely escaped left-wing lynch mobs who stormed company properties in an anti-business fury at alleged chemical pollution in local Bariyan eco-systems.
David expanded TTCC's reach into plastics in the late 1990s as an executive vice-president for strategy, and later modernized the industrial production process with new smart technologies in the late 2000s.
He is a major figure within the Global Monetary Fund, having left Trans-Taverian between 2003 and 2006 to serve as a chief economist in the institution. Despite returning to the private sector, he retains important connections and influence over the global body.
Zander van Voort (born 1982) - The current Chairman of the Board of Directors of Trans-Taverian Chemical Company and in-law of the Goldwaters, being married to David's sister, Ilana, since 2008. Born and raised in the Jewish community in Westonaria, Zander took after most of the Jewish men there and became a banker and trader in diamonds and precious metals, a lucrative global market.
He came to Belhavia in 2007 to work at GBRG as a precious metal financial analyst. A year later, he met Ilana Goldwater on a shidduch (traditional Jewish date) despite being less religious than the Goldwaters. After 6 months, he proposed and they got married in late 2008 in a lavish wedding infamously "party-crashed" by paparazzi including a writer and cameraman from the Aisling tabloid Fate.
In 2010, he left GBRG and was made executive vice-president for international markets as well as an inside director on the company's board. After spearheading several successful high-profile acquisitions for Trans-Taverian among global chemical firms, CEO David Goldwater orchestrated Zander's appointment as Chairman of the board of directors, further securing family control over the company.