Varoufakis cites meeting with daughter for skipping vote

Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis prompted surprise on Friday when he revealed that he would not attend the vote to authorize Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to secure an agreement with lenders, citing family reasons.

Varoufakis sent a letter to Parliament Speaker Zoe Constantopoulou notifying her that he would not attend but that if he were there, he would vote in favor of Tsipras concluding a deal based on the proposals submitted to lenders on Thursday night.

However, soon afterward photos of Varoufakis and his wife, artist Danae Stratou, traveling by boat to Aegina, where they have a holiday home, were published on the Internet. This prompted angry reactions from numerous Greeks on social media. Varoufakis took to Twitter to explain that he was missing the vote in order to see his daughter before she left for Australia.

Varoufakis also published an op-ed in the Guardian newspaper claiming that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble “wants Greece to be pushed out of the single currency to put the fear of God into the French and have them accept his model of a disciplinarian eurozone.”