As if it needed more firepower, Alibaba has brought aboard J. Michael Evans, a former top Goldman Sachs GS +1.08% executive —and an Olympic gold-medal winner—as an independent board member.
In the expanded filing released Monday, Alibaba named both its 27 management partners and its nine-member board of directors. In addition to five directors appointed by the partners, there will be four independents — one of whom will be Mr. Evans, 56.
It is a resurfacing for Mr. Evans after a brief period out of the spotlight. He was one of Goldman’s brightest stars, and at one time considered a potential CEO candidate, until he retired from the firm last year.
His experience in the IPO business runs deep. He started in the equities business in the early 1990s. As global head of equity capital markets, he helped lead the bank’s own public debut in 1999. In 2004 he was named chairman of Goldman Sachs’s Asia operations, before returning to New York and being named head of global growth markets.
During his time in Asia, Goldman was the lead bank on the Hong Kong IPO of Alibaba’s business-to-business subsidiary, Alibaba.com, in 2007.
At Goldman Mr. Evans’s profile reached its apex after the financial crisis. In the wake of the crisis, and after Goldman settled a $550 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Evans co-led a committee tasked with an internal business practices review. It was a role that many saw as preparation for potentially taking over from Lloyd Blankfein as chief executive, but the senior leadership weathered the storm of the crisis.
After retiring, it was not clear what Mr. Evans’s next move would be, though it was expected to be high profile.
Mr. Evans, who is Canadian, won a gold medal in rowing at the 1984 Los Angeles summer games. He is a 1981 graduate of Princeton. A spot on the board of a company like Alibaba—a major appointment but not a full-time job—could be a stepping stone to a corporate job as chief executive of a large corporation.
Goldman is one of five senior lead banks on Alibaba’s IPO, and stands to earn potentially tens of millions in fees. Its top banker on the deal is current Asia-Pacific chairman, Beijing-based vice chairman Mark Schwartz, who was named to that job after Mr. Evans left Asia and was named head of global growth markets. (That actually marked a return to the bank for Mr. Schwartz, who spent a decade away.)
The banks have been asked to share the lead-bank role and fee pool, a move in contrast to the way some other companies, such as Facebook, gave one bank a clear leadership role and the lion’s share of the spoils.
Some of the fees are reserved for bonuses, and it’s not yet clear how they will be divvied up. Goldman will be hoping for a good chunk of them. It has one of the longest standing relationships among the banks with Alibaba and showed, in leading Twitter’s IPO, that it could quiet the hoopla of a big offering with a drama-free debut. (Facebook, with Morgan Stanley in the lead, was not so lucky.)
Mr. Evans is the only former banker on the board. The other new independent members are Yahoo co-founder and early Alibaba investor Jerry Yang, former top KPMG executive Walter Teh Ming Kwauk, and former top Hong Kong official Chee Hwa Tung.