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Former Deputy Minister and head of the negotiations between Athens and the representatives of creditor institutions Efklidis Tsakalotos is Greece’s new Minister of Finance.

It is expected that his name will be announced after the end of the over six hours long meeting of political party leaders under the auspices of Greece’s President Prokopis Pavlopoulos. Tsakalotos will take an oath immediately afterwards.

New Minister of Finance Efklidis Tsakalotos was born in Rotterdam in 1960. He is a graduate of Eton College and holds a degree in economics and political science from the University of Sussex and the University of Oxford. He was a lecturer at Britain's University of Kent and the Economic University of Athens. Since 2010 he has been a professor of finance at the University of Athens.

Efklidis Tsakalotos comes from a famous Athenian family, whose roots are in Preveza in Western Greece. His grandfather’s brother Trasivoulos Tsakalotos was a Greek army officer during World War II and the Civil War in Greece.

In SYRIZA he is also known as the "left aristocrat", a byname that he was given after the disclosure of MPs’ tax returns in 2013 when the documents showed that Efklidis Tsakalotos had invested large sums in hedge funds such as BlackRock and JP Morgan. In response to the attacks against him, he said that his father had made the investments whereas he himself was just a co-beneficiary. He is married to his student love Denise Gibson, who is also an economist and director of the research department of the Bank of Greece.

He is taking over the post in an extremely difficult time for the Greek economy. Banks have been closed for a week and they have totally run out of liquidity. According to banking sources cited by Reuters, they will remain closed in the coming days under a new legal order that will be issued today.

Another meeting of the leadership of Greek banks at the Court of Audit at 6:00 pm today will decide on the duration of the bank holiday. The meeting will take place under the leadership of president of the Hellenic Bank Association Louka Katseli and Deputy Minister of Finance Dimitris Mardas, and will also discuss the overall state of the Greek banking system.

European Council President Donald Tusk has confirmed, via Twitter, the information on the heads of euro zone member states meeting on Greece in Brussels tomorrow,

To be continued