Fotis Kouvelis, a lawyer and veteran left-wing politician turning 70 next week, will be sworn in as Greece’s new shipping minister later on Wednesday.
He was appointed on Tuesday as part of a cabinet reshuffle that saw his predecessor Panagiotis Kouroumplis, 66, leave government to become the Greek ruling Syriza party’s parliamentary spokesman.
Kouvelis has no known links to, or views about the shipping industry.
The soft-spoken politician's most powerful political role so far has been as founder and leader of the Democratic Left -- one of the three parties that formed a conservative-led coalition government in 2012.
Kouvelis, however, quit that government in 2013 to protest planned firings at a state broadcaster and then helped to bring about its downfall in a general election in 2015.
Kouvelis since departed that party and turned friendly towards Greece's new prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who used to be a bitter former rival.
Tsipras, 44, rewarded Kouvelis in February 2018 by appointing him as deputy defence minister.
Outgoing shipping minister Panagiotis Kouroumplis had been an ardent defender of the industry in its ongoing taxation row with the European Commission, as well as in environmental talks at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).
Kouroumplis, however, had become a liability for the government after what many critics described as a lackluster rescue response by his ministry to an oil spill last year and a forest fire that killed almost 100 people near Athens last month.
The Tsipras government's four-year term expires in autumn 2019.
