Focus Information Agency, Bulgaria’s oldest privately held press service, reported Saturday that Brussels had begun pressuring Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev to reign in the new EU member state’s gambling scene.

The press agency charged that EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Charlie McCreevy and others were impeding Sofia officials’ attempts to amend the nation’s gambling laws.

”The Bulgarian goal,” it said, “is to incorporate legal gambling in the so-called Directive for Services.”

No further developments on the topic have been posted on Focus Information’s site.