Stern says allowing close relations between business and government was a German idea. Now the EU is having to deal with the same problem in Brussels (in German).

All About Alpha says the European Parliament is getting advice biased against hedge funds.

Graft is a tax on the poor, says Transparency International. Indeed, and it’s a tax on the middle-class and the rich too.

The Commission has been getting worked up about organised crime in Bulgaria recently. The country makes Italy look like an upstanding citizen, says Transitions Online.

if his novels read more like today’s news than fiction, it’s because they often are. An Olympic wannabe-wrestler who claims to have himself engaged in skullduggery in the lawless days of post-communist Bulgaria, Stoev mixed real-life underworld and government corruption with fiction in his BG Godfather series. The details were so vivid that he became a victim. The 35-year-old writer was gunned down in broad daylight on a street in central Sofia and died while undergoing surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his brain.

The Economist is also interested in Bulgaria this week

Cyberlaw is a new expert blog, specialising in data protection, cybercrime, digital rights. Worth keeping an eye on.

The author of Cyberlaw might be interested to read that confidential state data is available on CDs in the markets of Kiev.

UK minister Margaret Hodge is accused of colluding with Vodafone to keep mobile phone charges high. The details will be on Channel 4 tomorrow. Of course it doesn’t matter much, because the real problem is a lack of competition. Telecoms providers enjoy “collective dominance”, a (disputed) concept in EU and competition law that is basically a feature of oligopolies.

Daniel Hannan says nobody cares about EU corruption. “is it, perhaps, that we expect the EU to be corrupt? For all that we complain about our MPs, we still want them to be honourable, and are upset when they fall short. MEPs, by contrast, are regarded as irredeemable. Brussels sleaze is not news.”

And in the First Post, he says the integration method is like guerrilla warfare: “never reveal more than absolutely necessary; never let in the daylight; above all, never draw up your phalanxes and offer pitched battle. ”

There’s a new issue of Social Europe Journal, with an essay by Will Hutton and an interview with enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn - download PDF (1.1 Mb).

Tim Worstall on restrictions to trade and industry from the Precautionary Principle: “the default position should be full free trade: those who wish to argue for restrictions would have to make their case”

Jan Seifert notes that the two main political groups have decided how power is to be distributed in Parliament after the 2009 elections. And MEPs have the nerve to criticise Zimbabwe.

The irony of a convicted criminal being put in charge of the Justice and Home Affairs department! Bruno Waterfield asks “with his own skeletons in the cupboard, with what moral authority will Mr Barrot be able to take up this policy?” (You need to work on your sentence structure, Bruno!)

A weird half-lobby group half-parliamentary educational scheme is to be evicted from Parliament, says the International Herald Tribune.