Bulgarian corruption - The Americans know about it

For anyone who is interested in the (unfortunately) real-life stories of Balkan-style corruption, have a look at these two US State Department cables that were released by WikiLeaks over the New Year holiday period.

The first one is titled "How do you make them reform when they don't want to?" and it details the background to what should have been a very negative EU progress report on Bulgarian anti-corruption measures. Unfortunately, the report was 'watered down' for political reasons, which were not specified. Well, I can tell you them - it doesn't look good that EU membership and the high ideals its promotes has not changed anything in Bulgaria and many other member states, new and old. What the politicians in the new and candidate states and Brussels painted (and continue to do so) was that with EU membership all these new states will become as rich as efficient as Germany in an instant. As we saw in 2010, most of Europe is not like Germany. Even 'old' members, such as Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal are mired in high levels of corruption and/or had their supposed economic booms exposed to be solely built upon generous EU funding and pure speculation. Nothing really has changed integrally and intrinsically - it has all been cosmetic, much like the dumbing down of the EU report on Bulgaria.

The second one is far more gangsta and quite a story - Bulgarian soccer receives a red card for corruption. It has violence, murder, excess, rich-bastard football players and their pop-star WAGs, tax evasion... in other words, a real-life plot for a renewed series of 'Footballers Wives'. The match fixing schemes are unbelievable! And I love how they quote that Bulgarians half-jokingly say that their team's fourth place at the World Cup in 1994 has been the country's only achievement since the fall of Communism.

I have to say, these embassy officials seem to have a great job where they get to report about all of the lurid and gossipy details of the countries they are posted, and get paid for it! Pity the poor Bulgarians who have to put up with this reality.