Roel Pieper

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Roland ("Roel") Pieper (1956 - ) is a Dutch IT-entrepreneur. Pieper was born in Vlaardingen, son of an engineer at a car manufacturer. His father died when Pieper was 20, and on his 18th birthday he was subject to a motoring accident which destroyed his sporting career as a player of the Juventus Schiedam basketball team. According to himself, both of these experiences gave him a certain hardness. Pieper obtained his engineer's degree from the Delft University of Technology, 1980, in informatics.

After graduation, he worked for ten years for Software AG (both in Germany and in the United States). In the United States he worked for Unix System Laboratories of AT&T. In 1993, he became the president of UB Networks formerly Ungermann-Bass, a subsidiary of Tandem ComputersUB Networks was sold to Newbridge Networks successfully in 1996 after Pieper joined Tandem Computers as CEO. In 1995 Pieper became president and CEO of Tandem Computers where he was instrumental in repositioning the company. Under Pieper's leadership Tandem was sold to Compaq in 1997, and Pieper became a member of the executive board of Compaq. Pieper's reputation rose significantly during his American period, where he got to a reputation as a restructurer. His public face was that of putting ailing companies back on the rails;

Pieper returned to the Netherlands in 1998. For one year he was board member of the Dutch electronics giant Philips on an invitation by Cor Boonstra, then Philips' president. This involvement ended abruptly in May 1999 when Pieper got involved in the claimed coding technology of Jan Sloot, a connection Pieper made on behalf of Philips. Philips officially decided not to use the technology. Pieper then decided to support the invention as a private investor and later also as board member. The inventor died of a heart attack shortly after he demonstrated his technology to a group of 20 investors and technology companies in the summer of 1999. Pieper came out of his one year employment with Philips with a golden handshake of undisclosed value.

In 1998, together with ex-minister of economy Hans Wijers, Pieper set up Twinning, an incubator for starting entrepreneurs, particularly in the IT and especially the Internet sector. The project got ninety millions Guilders of government subsidy, and as the Dot-com bubble burst, the ministry decided to sell Twinning to a group of private investors. Of the fifty companies that Twinning started, more than 35 are still operating and some very successfully.

Pieper also independently took part in other IT businesses, including BitMagic of Michiel Frackers and Francisco van Jole. By 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a professor of Electronic Commerce, a newly created chair at the faculty of informatics and technology management of the University of Twente.

In the end of 1999 Pieper founded Insight Capital Partners Europe, a private investment society for IT-businesses, now operating under the name of Favonius Ventures, particularly in the field of E-commerce, and in November 2000 he became Chairman of the Board of Lernout & Hauspie, a Flemish company in speech technology. Pieper was instrumental to discover a financial scandal at the company which had occurred in the period 1996-1999. In cooperation with the Belgian authorities, Pieper assisted to secure all information that ultimately led to the formal accusation of the founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie. Pieper left as Chairman of the board after the shareholders deciced to appoint a new CEO.

In 2001, Pieper conducted a study requested by minister Tineke Netelenbos for setting up a system for road pricing, the Mobimiles. Later that year he became president of Connekt, an organisation for questions of road tolling in the Netherlands. In 2003, Pieper started a new venture around Very Light Jets (VLJ), in cooperation with Eclipse Aviation Corporation in the USA. The new venture called ETIRC Aviation is now establishing an Air Taxi network for Europe,Turkey and Russia. In 2007, Pieper was awarded with the RusPrix by the Russian Embassy in the Netherlands. Pieper is active in several projects in Russia for alternative energies such as the Sochi Winter Olympics project for public transportation using hydrogen and other natural resources.

In May 2003, Pieper was involved in an incident where a confused man broke into his house in Aerdenhout, and stabbed his wife. Pieper is married, and has six children. In the summer of 2007, Pieper became one of the major owners of the Amsterdam Basketball Club and is working to cooperate with the city of Amsterdam on a new youth project in cooperation with the school network Amarantis.

The man who stabbed Pieper's wife was convicted to have coerced psychiatric treatment in a closed institute, (Terbeschikkingstelling in Dutch language) and was on temporary release in 2007. Pieper emigrated in 2008 to France with one of the stated reason that he was not or far too late informed by the police or Ministry of Justice of this temporary release.^[1]^[2]