Compuware Corp. (Nasdaq: CPWR) Chief Executive and Chairman Peter Karmanos Jr. says he’s looking to retire by 2013, when he turns 70 and the Detroit-based software company he founded turns 40.
“I’d like to leave with a really great flourish at the end,” Karmanos told The Detroit Free Press. ,
Compuware has an operation in Durham at the American Tobacco complex.
Karmanos believes the company could triple its market value to $6 billion by 2013.
Karmanos has a successor in place: Forty-eight-year-old Robert Paul has been president and chief operating officer for the past two years.
“Hopefully, before long, I will move to executive chairman but still work, and Bob will go to CEO, and we’ll have (a new) COO in place,” Karmanos said.
The 67-year-old moved Compuware’s headquarters in 2002 from suburban Farmington Hills to a new building in downtown Detroit. The company has more than 4,000 employees worldwide and about 1,900 in Detroit.
Karmanos also owns the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes.
He and his wife, Danialle, are expecting their third child next month. He also has three sons and eight grandchildren with his first wife, Barbara, for whom he established the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit in 1995.
Karmanos made headlines in 2009 for hiring former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick as a salesman for Compuware subsidiary Covisint in Dallas after Kilpatrick had resigned and served jail time stemming from a conviction for lying under oath about an affair with his chief of staff.
A Detroit judge last year found Kilpatrick guilty of violating his probation after prosecutors revealed he had funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into his wife’s bank accounts and failed to disclose $240,000 in loans from Karmanos and three other top business executives.
Read the Free Press interview here.
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