Roland "Roel" Pieper (born 1956, Vlaardingen, Netherlands) is a Dutch IT-entrepreneur.
Early life and education Pieper was born (April 13, 1956) in Vlaardingen, son of an engineer at a car manufacturer. His father died when Pieper was 20, and on his 18th birthday he suffered a motoring accident which destroyed his sporting career as a player of the Juventus Schiedam basketball team. According to Pieper, both of these experiences instilled him with a certain toughness. Pieper obtained his MSc - Ir - degree from the Delft University of Technology, 1980, in computer science.
Career in the United States After graduation, he worked for ten years for Software AG (both in Germany and in the United States), where he became chief technology officer for the US branch. After leaving Software AG he was selected to be the chief executive officer (CEO) for Unix System Laboratories in the United States, a division of Bell Laboratories of AT&T. In 1993, after the resignation of co-founder Ralph Ungermann, Roel became the president and CEO of Ungermann-Bass. Ungermann was tied to Tandem Computers by an earlier White Knight deal and Ungermann resigned after his required term. Roel renamed the company UB Networks while it was a subsidiary of Tandem Computers. Roel restructured UB Networks research investments into ATM technology, which was popular at the time, instead of continuing Ralph Ungermann's earlier successful investments and leadership in Ethernet technology. Ungermann-Bass developed the first Virtual Network Architecture (VNA) in 1993. The ATM business was subsequently sold by Roel to Cisco. UB Networks itself was sold to Newbridge Networks successfully in 1996 after Pieper joined Tandem Computers as CEO. In 1996 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. During his time in the US, Pieper gained a reputation as a successful restructurer. Under Pieper's leadership, USL, UB and Tandem Computer were successfully restructured and sold to strategic players in the industry.
Career in the Netherlands Pieper returned to the Netherlands in 1998. For one year he was board member of the Dutch electronics giant Philips by invitation of 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, though Sloot's claimed huge compression is mathematically impossible. 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. After one year, Pieper ended his employment at Philips with a severance package 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 received ninety Million 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 more than 30 IT businesses all as investor and or adviser. On 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. Pieper ended as a professor of business administration and corporate governance at the university of Twente in 2013.
At the end of 1999, Pieper founded Insight Capital Partners Europe, a private investment fund for IT-businesses, later operating under the name of Favonius Ventures, particularly in the field of e-commerce. In November 2000 he became chairman of the board of Lernout & Hauspie, a Flemish company specializing in speech recognition technology. Pieper was instrumental in uncovering a financial scandal at this company, which took place in the period 1996–1999, before he joined the company. In cooperation with the Belgian authorities, Pieper helped to secure information that ultimately led to the formal charging of the founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie. Pieper left as chairman of the board after the shareholders decided to appoint a new CEO and board.
In 2001, Pieper entered into the board of advisors of Nearshore IT services company, Levi9 Global Sourcing and conducted a study requested by minister Tineke Netelenbos for setting up a system for road pricing, called Mobimiles. Later that year he became president of Connekt, an organisation for addressing road tolling issues in the Netherlands. He presided as chairman for seven years.
Favonius Ventures In 2001 with financial backing from private institutions, ING, CalPERS, and ABN AMRO, he established Favonius Ventures with offices in London and Amsterdam. In July 2006, Favonius Ventures received all of the technology investments of ABN AMRO Capital which is the private equity business unit of ABN AMRO Bank N.V.
Eclipse Aviation In 2003, Pieper started a new venture involving Very Light Jets (VLJ), in cooperation with Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Eclipse Aviation Corporation.
After Semyon Bolotin (; born 1985 or 1985) and a son of Roel Pieper, who had gone to school together and played on the same basketball team, introduced their fathers to each other, Roel Pieper and the Russian businessman Daniel Bolotin established in Luxembourg a joint venture investment business, which was headquartered in The Netherlands, called European Technology and Investment Research Center, or ETIRC BV. Alternate archive at compromat.ru on 27 December 2010 as Пенсионная схема "Связь-банка": "Русский миллиардер" Евгений Болотин придумал, как использовать в своих интересах деньги пенсионеров, чтобы Счетная палата не подкопалась (Svyaz-Bank pension scheme: "Russian billionaire" Yevgeny Bolotin figured out how to use pensioners' money in his own interests so that the Accounts Chamber does not undermine). ETIRC, which had offices in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Turkey and Israel, used The Netherlands as a gateway for investments between the West and eastern Europe, Turkey, Russia and countries of the CIS. Bolotin and Pieper had a 42.7% stake in ETIRC Aviation and a 14.6% stake was held by the Cyprus-firm Martilio Holdings Ltd. which was controlled by Svyaz-Bank. Alternate archive at compromat.ru on 8 July 2010 as 55 млрд руб. кредитов "Связь-банка" были необеспеченными: Главным источником разбазаривания денег командой "питерского банкира" Геннадия Мещерякова был депозит Усманова на $700 млн (RUB 55 billion Svyaz-Bank loans were unsecured: The main source of the squandering of money by the team of the "St. Petersburg banker" Gennady Meshcheryakov was Usmanov's $ 700 million deposit).
In 2007, ETIRC launched a joint venture with the luxury goods provider Atasay whose founder Atasay Kamer's son Cihan Kamer is very close to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and is known as Erdogan's "Golden Man" ().
The main project of ETIRC was ETIRC Aviation, which sought to establish an Air Taxi network for Europe, Turkey and Russia and a second manufacturing location for the Eclipse 500 jet at Ulyanovsk Oblast in Russia for the European market. In July 2008, the Luxembourg-based ETIRC Aviation, which by then had become Eclipse Aviation's largest shareholder, ousted Eclipse Aviation founder Vern Raburn from his position as CEO. Pieper then took over the job of acting CEO for Eclipse Corporation at the request of the shareholders and bondholders.
Before the collapse of Svyaz-Bank and its subsequent takeover by VEB, both Bolotin and Pieper received a $150 million loan from Svyaz-Bank in December 2007 for their purchase of Eclipse Aviation to rebrand the company as Eclipse Aerospace. Alternate archive at compromat.ru on 27 December 2010 as Пенсионная схема "Связь-банка": "Русский миллиардер" Евгений Болотин придумал, как использовать в своих интересах деньги пенсионеров, чтобы Счетная палата не подкопалась (Svyaz-Bank pension scheme: "Russian billionaire" Evgeny Bolotin figured out how to use pensioners' money in his own interests so that the Accounts Chamber does not undermine).
In the autumn of 2008, after Pieper had decided to raise the price of the Eclipse 500 aircraft substantially, several Eclipse customers sued Eclipse for the return of their deposits, claiming they had waited years for the delivery of their Eclipse 500 jets. After the collapse of the financial markets in autumn of 2008, the company Eclipse needed to be restructured and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with the stated plan that a new company, headed by Pieper, would buy the assets of Eclipse and continue manufacturing. Pieper attempted to secure the necessary funds for this acquisition, but was unsuccessful largely due to the economic downturn, which led to several potential investors bowing out at the last moment. Eclipse Aviation ran out of money in mid-February 2009, ceased operations, and laid off its remaining 850 employees. On February 25, a group of creditors petitioned the Delaware bankruptcy court to convert Eclipse's bankruptcy to Chapter 7 liquidation. Soon thereafter, the board of directors (including Pieper) acknowledged the company had no other options but to file for Chapter 7, effectively ending the company's 10-year run, during which it spent an estimated $2 billion in investments and loans. Various reports following the Chapter 7 filing of the company insinuated financial problems for Pieper including an email from Pieper himself
On 7 April 2009, following the Chapter 7 filing of Eclipse Aviation, ETIRC BV in the Netherlands also declared bankruptcy. The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported that Pieper had invested US$146 million in Eclipse through ETIRC. Roel Pieper has two lawsuits pending on the demise of ETIRC BV. The first case led by a group of consultants who claim to not have been paid for six months was lost. including a delay and review of a case by a legal firm that specialises in take-overs and bankruptcy claims, and Al Mann, who had Roel Pieper sign a 10 million collateral before he would invest 20 million in Eclipse. Al Mann and Roel Pieper have subsequently settled out of court Although in a court case of 2016 there were still outstanding issues with Mann. in 2019 documents revealed that Roel Pieper had an outstanding debt of 19 million euros and that assets in the Netherlands were being seized.
This investment was done with non-collateral US$150 million credit of Russian Sviaz-bank or Svyaz-Bank (). The Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported that this credit became later an object of an investigation in Russia, of which Pieper was not a part.
At the same time he was fighting to save Eclipse, Pieper was investing tens of millions of dollars in a Russian technology to extract diesel fuel from coal. The Coal to Liquid project is on hold and will restart when oil prices have reached prices again above 100 dollars per barrel.
Failures and successes