Enrique Riquelme: “I thought Florentino would pull a rabbit out of his hat, but his project is me”

The Spanish businessman Enrique Riquelme, candidate for the presidency of Real Madrid, expressed this Friday that “I thought that Florentino Pérez was going to bring out that great Florentino of the past and pull a rabbit out of his hat, but no,” because he criticized that his project is “going against” the Alicante native.

“The presentation of Florentino’s candidacy surprised me. I believe that Florentino has a great legacy, we must recognize it, without a doubt. He has also been a good businessman. But this is like the one who scores 10 consecutive seasons, more than 40 goals and his goals begin to decrease, well it is time for him to retire,” said the man from Alicante in an interview with Europa Press.

Riquelme revealed that he “expected much more” from the “staging of his candidacy after more than 20 years without elections.” “We saw that we were going to present the social part at 12 in the morning and he at 7, we thought about putting it at the same time so that it wouldn’t be copied. But he said, ‘what are you going to copy from?’ You have had 23 years to give proposals to partners and you are going to give them in the last 6 hours? “It’s not credible,” he criticized.

“I simply had to copy and paste if what I wanted was to do something for the partner, but I was surprised that I really thought that he was going to remove that great Florentino Pérez that we knew from the past and would have pulled a rabbit out of his hat, but no, his project is me. His project is to go against me,” he said.

Then, he addressed Pérez’s words about his company and the solvency that the until now Madrid president questioned. “There are certain lines that I promised myself at the beginning of the campaign that were not going to happen. It is making it really difficult for me. We are listed companies, it is public. I was talking about the debt and continued to insist when they wrote to us from Bloomberg asking for an apology, which they received from the circle, with name and surname, of Florentino Pérez, false information,” he revealed.

Pérez stated that Riquelme wanted to “use Real Madrid” because he “needs” it for his company, something that the Alicante native flatly denies. “We issued, three-four weeks ago, in New York, the main financial center in the world, we went for 2,000 million and in three hours they gave us 8,000 million dollars,” he started.

“That is to say, a record, where the main banks in the world, including the Spanish ones, have financed us 3.5 billion dollars to acquire Iberdrola in Mexico. A company that has 4 billion dollars. Pérez is playing the game of hoax, of lies, where I no longer want to talk about that topic anymore, because in the end it will find me. I don’t want to cross certain lines,” he repeated.

For Riquelme, “the limit” is “personal disqualification, of course family and professional,” as well as “lies and hoaxes.” “I don’t want to cross that limit, even if it benefits me in the short term, in these elections, because it will greatly harm Real Madrid. And I also don’t want to harm the legacy of Florentino Pérez. Let his people advise him better. I hope that he reflects, reconsiders, and comes back, or at least enters into a line of proposing things, and that I am not his campaign,” he warned, before asking Pérez not to talk about him, because “it is becoming more and more like a party.” political”.

The man from Alicante also spoke about Cox Energy and his business career. “At my age I have the company I have, whether larger or smaller, it is a company that I founded, I have more than 60% of the participation, it is public, and its numbers today are very close to what he was very recently. It is true that his company has grown in recent years since he stepped away from the first line of executives and left a great professional at the helm. Mr. Pérez at my age was a councilor of the Madrid City Council, he failed politically and then became a businessman,” he added.

“I am clear that I will stop being the first line executive in my group, to be able to dedicate all my time to Real Madrid. I do not need Real Madrid at all, because I, at any time, can be or not be in my company. He has always had to be in his company, because many times the value of his shares was lower than the debt he had,” he added.

Finally, he explained why he talks about “privatization” if Florentino Pérez is president. “There is talk that it is for the member, to protect the member and that this goes back to being their members. Hey, how can it be again? It is that it is already their members. They are lying, it is privatizing the club to private groups. It doesn’t matter if it is 5, 1 or 90%. The importance is the change in the club’s statutes, first it has to make those elections. The next thing that comes is a referendum, which they have tried to privatize without the referendum. And thank goodness that people from his board of directors have stopped him, because it would have been a crime,” he said.

“Since we have all this that is little transparency and no governance and democracy, these elections could be the last because then there is the referendum. And the club will no longer belong to its members. I know that it is sometimes not easy to explain. I know that it is complex. And they want it to be complex,” he concluded.