During EMC’s earnings conference call today, Tucci said he has agreed with a request from EMC’s board to stay on as chairman and CEO into 2013. He said when he does step down, his replacement will come from EMC’s senior management team but the vendor is not yet ready to name the successor.

“After much soul-searching, I have agreed to extend my role as chairman and CEO into 2013,” Tucci said. “I’ve started to increase the responsibilities of my senior team. When the time is right, my successor will be named.”

Tucci last September told the Wall Street Journal that he would relinquish his CEO title by the end of 2012 and remain on as chairman for two years.

The top candidates to replace Tucci are Pat Gelsinger, president of EMC’s information infrastructure product group; CFO Dave Goulden; and Howard Elias, president of EMC’s cloud services group.

The Journal Thursday led a story on corporate jet abuse with Tucci’s use of EMC jets. The Journal claimed EMC jets made 393 trips over four years to areas where Tucci has vacation homes – Cape Cod, Mass., the New Jersey shore and the Florida keys. That comes to more than 98 flights a year to those sites.

The newspaper estimated the cost of EMC’s flights to those airports at $3.1 million, while noting that EMC puts the cost at $664,079.

A follow-up story in the Boston Herald today quotes an email from an EMC shareholder who took exception to Tucci’s jet-setting on the corporate dime:

“In exceptional cases, we sometimes speak out with other share owners about executive excesses,” wrote Clark McKinley, spokesman for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, in an e-mail. “As far as I know now, this is one of them.”

The Herald story said CPERS owns 5.4 million shares of EMC stock.

Tucci, 63, ranks 15th on Forbes’ 2011 corporate compensation list with $31.63 million in salary, bonuses and stock gains. He has been paid $86.79 million over the past five years, according to Forbes.