Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has confirmed that he had a secret plan to hack into people’s tax codes to create a parallel payments system when Greece was on the verge of falling out of the euro.

“We were planning to create surreptitiously a reserve account attached to every taxpayer’s number without telling anyone, just to have this system function at the touch of a button to allow us to give pin numbers to tax file number holders – tax payers”, said Varoufakis.

He sought to play down the idea a contingency plan that had not been implemented.

Varoufakis’ initiative would have enabled the banking system to instantly convert from the euro to the drachma. He outlined the scheme on July the 16th in a conference call to a number of senior financiers.

At the time Greece had been on the verge of tumbling out of the euro in the dispute with creditors over a new bailout deal.

Varoufakis said he had even recruited a childhood friend to hack into his own ministry’