BULGARIA, ROMANIA UNDER STRICTEST EU EYE

Bulgaria and Romania are set to get the go-ahead to join the European Union on January 1 under the strictest conditions ever applied to new members of the club.

Bulgaria will come under the toughest EU scrutiny and faces possible legal and financial sanctions unless it proves it is serious in tackling organised crime and high-level corruption.

Olli Rehn, the enlargement commissioner, and Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, are on Tuesday expected to warn Sergey Stanishev, Bulgarian prime minister, that his country will be under unprecedented scrutiny in the coming months.

Mr Rehn and Mr Barroso are understood to have rejected the idea of postponing Bulgaria or Romania's entry until 2008 - the toughest sanction available to the EU - on the grounds it would discourage reformers.

"We think the best way to achieve our aim is to work with them with the threat of these measures," said a senior European Commission official. "It's a better way to achieve results than by postponing until 2008."

Mr Stanishev will be warned in Strasbourg that his country could be subject to "safeguard measures" - sanctions that can be activated after a country joins the club - unless EU monitors say that Sofia has cleaned up its act.

The EU has the power to suspend regional aid payments worth billions of euros to either Bulgaria and Romania if they are shown to be subject to persistent fraud.

If Bulgaria fails to tackle crime and corruption, it could be excluded from EU legal cooperation and its courts' judgements would not be recognised by the union.
"These are the toughest safeguard measures yet. This is something new," said the EU official. "These measures can be triggered at any time.

"In the case of Bulgaria, we hoped they would deliver concrete results over the summer in tackling high-level corruption and organised crime but progress has been disappointing."
Mr Rehn will make his formal report on Romania and Bulgaria's progress on September 26.
Official concern in Brussels about Bulgaria's preparations are likely to heighten the mood of "enlargement fatigue" in the 25-member club.

Some member states - notably Britain - have been gripped by fears that the accession of the two poor countries in south-eastern Europe could lead to mass immigration and increased organised crime.

Senior Bulgarian officials say it takes time to build cases that could lead to convictions of politicians and judicial officials involved in major corruption cases or leading underworld figures linked to more than 100 unsolved assassinations since the mid-1990s.
But the indictment of several regional prosecutors during August suggests a crackdown may finally be getting under way.

Boris Velchev, Bulgaria's prosecutor general, said in a recent interview with the Financial Times that close monitoring by the European Commission after accession would be welcome, but warned against a safety clause that denied recognition to his country's legal system.
"A safety clause would be harmful because it would mean the Bulgarian legal system, which we have been struggling to build, is denied recognition."