It is official: Enrique Riquelme will fight to dethrone Florentino Pérez

MadridEnrique Riquelme Vives (Coix, Alicante, 1989) is finally taking a step forward and will battle to preside over Real Madrid, as he communicated this Thursday afternoon to the Electoral Board of Real Madrid. The businessman has managed to secure a list of names to contest the presidency against Florentino Pérez, who after 26 years presiding over the club, and for the first time, will have an opponent in the white club's elections, the first since those in 2006, which Ramón Calderón won.

"My objective is to present a project for the Real Madrid of the future, exciting for all madridistas and especially focused on returning the members to the forefront of a new cycle, guaranteeing that they will be the sole and authentic owners of the best club in the world," Riquelme states in the letter in which he officializes the candidacy that he has sent to the Electoral Board.

"We are ethically and morally obliged to take the step," the businessman argued this week at an economic forum, while admitting that he was still working to finalize an "exciting" project. In fact, the names of those who will accompany him have not yet been revealed. "We didn't have a plan for today. We had been working for a long time, but the strategy was for 2028," he revealed. This was the year in which the elections were scheduled until Florentino announced that he was bringing them forward a few days ago in an unprecedented press conference."The candidacy meets the requirements demanded by the Social Statutes [of Real Madrid] and current electoral regulations to hold the presidency", it is stated in the letter. In this way, who is also the president of the energy company Cox meets the two requirements to run. Firstly, he has his own assets of more than 187 million euros (15% of Real Madrid's budget), as stated in the club's statutes. This limits the electoral race to profiles with very high economic solvency, but also with the immediate capacity to obtain the support of banks (a bank guarantee must be presented). At the same time, he has been a member of the club for more than twenty years, the other essential requirement.

Until the last moment, he has been looking for the people who will accompany him in this fight for the presidency. The difficulty, business sources explain to ARA, has been to add familiar faces. Some link it to the fact that no one wants to confront Florentino, one of the most influential and powerful businessmen in the State – he is also the president of the construction company ACS. The candidacy had to have a minimum of ten members and a maximum of twenty.

 in 2018, when he dedicated a cover to him.

Now, once the candidacy has been presented, it must be admitted (it will happen tomorrow, Friday, if it meets the set requirements). But appeals can also be filed against it before the Electoral Board (after its admission, you have two natural days to do so). If the list goes ahead, Madrid must announce the date and places of the voting.

From Panama to create Cox

Riquelme is a native of a town in the Valencian Country with just over 7,000 inhabitants, although his professional career has forced him to travel on repeated occasions to Latin America, especially to Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Panama, and Colombia. In fact, he began to build his fortune in Panama, where he founded the photovoltaic company Grupo Sol. In 2014, back in Spain, he founded Cox, and just ten years later he has managed to get it to go public. "The sun king." This is how the magazine Forbes christened him in 2018, when it dedicated a cover to him.