Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, triumphantly re-elected for a second term on Sunday, picked a safe pair of hands for the shipping portfolio in his new cabinet.
Incoming shipping minister Miltiadis Varvitsiotis held the same position once before in a previous conservative administration, between 2013 and 2015.
The trained laywer, who turned 54 on 21 June, has been a career politician with the ruling New Democracy party, which he has been representing in parliament for 23 years.
Over the past four years, Varvitsiotis was deputy foreign minister in charge of European affairs.
This experience will probably serve him well to fight Greek shipping’s corner in ongoing European Union talks over environmental and tax regulations that affect the maritime business.
In his first stint as shipping minister, Varvitsiotis had co-authored legislation imposing a one-off solidarity tax on Greek shipowners, as part of austerity measures amid the country’s sovereign debt crisis and EU bailout.
Varvitsiotis has been a member of a high-profile political family that goes back to the 19th century.
His father Yiannis was a conservative stalwart and party baron who in the 1990s served as a cabinet minister in a government headed by Mitsotakis’ father, Constantinos.
Miltiadis Varvitsiotis’s brother Thomas is the founder of an influential PR agency. Their sister Eleni is the Greek correspondent for the Financial Times.
