The European Commission report on the administration of EU funds in Bulgaria, which is due to come out on Wednesday, July 23, and is expected to offer caustic criticism and suggest harsh sanctions, has been front-page news in Bulgaria and drawn the attention of foreign media as well.

The Daily Telegraph claims to have seen the report, and, just like the report itself, the paper does not mince its words, summing up the situation in unequivocal terms: "[the subsidies] are being looted by officials working hand in hand with the mafia." The story goes on to quote sections of the actual report, which concludes that "Bulgaria itself has to make the commitment to cleanse its administration and ensure that the generous support it receives from the EU actually reaches its citizens and is not siphoned off by corrupt officials, operating together with organised crime."

The Telegraph says that Bulgaria looks set to lose badly needed money, as agencies administering the Phare programme are suspended.

Inexplicably, the photo accompanying the story is of Georgi Iliev, believed to be one of the biggest mafia bosses at the time of his death in 2005, when he was shot outside a nightclub. The story does not mention Iliev and there is no apparent reason to choose his photo, other than it being the Telegraph's only available image that loosely relates to organised crime in Bulgaria.

In a story titled "EU plans to block aid to Bulgaria," the BBC focuses on the report's tangible consequences for the Balkan state. The deck and the intro of the article leave the reader slightly confused as to how far along the decision to suspend EU subsidies the Comission has gone. The former asserts that the EC is "planning to block almost $1bn [610 million euros] in funds for Bulgaria as a penalty for failing to tackle corruption and organised crime," by withdrawing the right of two agencies to handle EU funds. But the intro says that "millions worth of aid could be lost unless authorities act decisively,  or as the story says later on, "unless things improve by November."

Bulgaria's chances of joining the Schengen area are also at risk, the BBC reports.

Like the Telegraph, the BBC describes the report as the most scathing written by EU executives about a member state. In a separate report, Romania is also expected to face strong criticism, the BBC says, especially over the parliaments delay in corruption cases investigation, but the EC will stop short of sanctions.

The story is reported in The Economist as well, which exudes a subtle sigh of relief, by inserting a not-so-subtle "at last" in the deck that reads "More EU sanctions, at last, to tackle corruption in Bulgaria." Still, The Economist makes the point that despite a succession of finger-wagging, wrist-slapping and pocket-money suspension, the EU has decided to keeps its biggest weapon in the locker for now, namely the safeguard clause, under which Bulgarian court decisions would no longer be automatically recognised in other member states.

The Dutch www.nisnews.nl does not much focus on the EU as a whole, but on where specific member states stand in their thinking about possible punitive measures against Bulgaria. The Netherlands, together with France and the UK, lead a group of member states advocating for sanctions against Bulgaria, the publication reports.

"Dutch diplomats are lobbying at the European Commission to get measures adopted in a progress report on Bulgaria due to appear next week," the article says. "According to NRC Handelsblad, a penalty cut of about 400 million euros has under their pressure been included in a draft version of the report, for irregularities with EU funds. The Commission still has to approve this draft."

The Hague also proposes provisionally excluding Bulgaria from the Schengen zone, the European area without border controls, which Bulgaria wants to join in 2011. Bulgaria wants to participate in the Schengen Information System this year, a step the EU could block.

International media have chosen to stay focused on the EC report, paying little attention to the EU Anti-Fraud Office report, leaked to Bulgarian media on July 16, which said that businessman Lyudmil Stoykov, who sponsored the president's election campaign, and his associate Mario Nikolov, who is a sponsor of President Georgi Purvanov's Bulgarian Socialist Party, were involved in large-scale abuses of EU funds. Chinese agency Xinhua is one of the media outlets that have picked up this story.