The young businessman Enrique Riquelme (Cox, Alicante, 1989) has become this week one of the protagonists of the Spanish renewable energy industry. The commercial court of Seville has awarded to his company, Cox Energy, the assets of Abengoa, the company that reigned for years in the Spanish photovoltaic energy sector and which recently found itself doomed to one of the biggest bankruptcies in the history of country. The subsidiaries of this Andalusian giant filed for bankruptcy at the end of last year with a debt of approximately 6,000 million euros.
Cox Energy’s offer – which saves 9,500 jobs and values ​​the business at 564 million – prevailed over Urbas, Terramar, RCP and Ultramar. Once the procedures of the bankruptcy process (resources, authorization from the Ministry of Defense) have been completed, Cox Energy will take over Abengoa’s activity with the aim of giving it the energy it needs to refloat it. In turn, Riquelme will take a giant step as an entrepreneur in the engineering and renewable energy sector.
His journeys in the business world began in the family. His father is Enrique Riquelme de la Torre, owner of the Empresas del Sol group that operates concrete quarries and also manages parking lots and gas stations in Murcia and Alicante. With the same entrepreneurial spirit as his father, Riquelme started at his account at the age of 21 and traveled to Panama, where he opened a small concrete factory. Soon after, the business grows towards road and mining infrastructure. In fact, Riquelme becomes one of the main suppliers of the expansion of the Panama Canal.
The first contact with the renewable energy sector arose in 2012, when he led the bidding and development phase of the Rainbow 50 project in Guatemala, the largest photovoltaic solar energy generation plant in the region. Subsequently, he develops similar projects in Chile, Mexico and Panama. Cox Energy was born two years later, in 2014, when Riquelme returned to Spain and founded this company in Madrid, which took on its own projects in Latin America and also began to deploy in the Iberian Peninsula.
Since then, the company has grown with comprehensive projects for power generation, electricity sales and facility maintenance. The expansion of the business, especially in Latin America (where Cox Energy has a division listed on the Mexican stock market) leads Riquelme to appear on the cover of Forbes magazine, which in 2018 designates him as “The man of solar energy” . Currently, the company controls a portfolio of a hundred projects and has a capacity of 8,000MWp under management. This year, company sources assure this newspaper that the group will bill around 600 million euros and that it will start trading on the Spanish stock market.
After the future integration of the thirty Abengoa subsidiaries, Riquelme will lead a renewable energy giant at an international level. At the age of 34, he has achieved this achievement thanks to his resources and vision, which even go beyond the business world. According to various media outlets, Riquelme is running for the future president of Real Madrid, an ambition that also runs in his family since his father was on Ramón Calderón’s board of directors (between 2006 and 2009). In addition to football, Riquelme shows great interest in Formula 1 and social action work. He is the chair of the advisory board of the Scholas Foundation for Central America, the Caribbean and Panama. The association, promoted by Pope Francis, works to promote inclusive education in these regions.
