By Yakubu LAAH InvestAdvocate

Lagos (INVESTADVOCATE)-Greece on Monday announced the appointment of Euclid Tsakalotos as new finance minister to replace Yanis Varoufakis who resigned early in the day.

Reports say Tsakalotos 55 years is a  mild-tempered professor who studied at prestigious private London school St Paul’s and at Oxford University, speaks Greek with a British accent.

According to a Reuters report, if European officials expect Tsakalotos, who has already been a key negotiator in drawn-out talks between the Greek government and creditors, to take a softer approach in the substance of new bailout talks, they can think again.

Tsakalotos is said to be a  brainchild of Syriza’s economic thinking, and he is likely to redouble efforts to put one of the most contentious issues in the five months of negotiations between Greece and its creditors — debt relief — back on the table.

Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Tsakalotos has a notable international academic curriculum. He studied politics, philosophy and economics as an undergraduate at Oxford, where he later completed his PhD in economics in 1989. He taught at the University of Kent before returning to Athens as a professor at Athens University of Economics, a Reuters report affirmed.