The indictment of ex-prime minister Adrian Nastase and his wife for graft-related charges makes the front page of most Romanian newspapers today. They also worry about how a Romanian far-right group gets vocal as part of the Neonazi movement in Berlin.

And they discuss a whole lists of issues related to the EU accession, from a new EP report to domestic preparations for the January 1 accession day.

Ex-prime minister, ex-Social Democratic Party (PSD) president Adrian Nastase is the first “shark” to be indicted by the National Anti-Corruption Department, Cotidianul reports, referring to the now common EU phrase that Romania has to catch a bit more than “little fish” in its fight against graft.

DNA sent a part of the so-called Zambaccian case, in which Nastase is accused of accepting bribes, abuse in office and blackmail related to a property in downtown Bucharest, to the High Court of Justice in Bucharest.

According to the DNA, Nastase and his wife received some 1,370,324 euro by illegal means in this case, while the newspaper quotes the man as dismissing all charges and calling himself a victim of political retribution.

Adevarul reports that Nastase and his wife will first appear before High Court judges on December 14 and points out that it is the first time in the history of the Romanian judiciary that a prime minister is sent to court on corruption charges.

According to Gandul, the event may lead to the exclusion of the ex-PSD boss from the ranks of his own party and quotes a member of a Bucharest PSD branch saying that the organization may request Nastase to make “a step back”, that is, to self-suspend as a party member.

And Evenimentul Zilei compares the Adrian and Dana Nastase to ex-dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, as the former are the highest-ranking couple indicted in Romania after the December 1989 trial of the latter.

At the time, the ex-dictator made the locally famous statement “We don’t answer but before the Great National Assembly!” (the communist parliament). Now, Nastase claims he cannot have a correct trial and poses in the victim of “political orders”, according to the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Adevarul focuses on statements made by the leader of the Romanian New Right (ND) movement, Sven Giblescu, at the first congress of the German far-right group NPD in Berlin these days.

According to the newspaper, Giblescu used the occasion to warn that “in 50 years there will be more Gipsies than Romanians in Romania… Our enemies operate at a global scale. Only modern European Christian nationalism will have an answer to the 21st century imperialism”, he said.

The issue is also covered by Gandul, whish reports that some 250 people from Italy, Romania and Portugal attended the NPD conference this past weekend.

Elsewhere in the newspapers, Cotidianul reports that the translation in the 22 EU languages of all questions that the Romanian nominee for a seat in the European Commission, Leonard Orban, will soon receive from members of the European Parliament took no less than five days.

Orban is bound for the Multilingualism portfolio in the EC once the country joins the EU next year.

For its part, Gandul writes that while the EP rapporteur for Bulgaria Geoffrey Van Orden was harsh in hist latest report on the progress made by the country on the path of accession, the rapporteur for Romania Pierre Moscovici was a lot milder, engouraging the government in Bucharest to consolidate reforms in various fields.

But according to Adevarul the Moscovici report debated by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the EP starting yesterday asks for supplementary measures from Romanian authorities in the field of child protection.

The same Gandul writes that future Romanian MEPs are displeased with their due salary of some 4,760 euro monthly and can hardly wait for 2009, when they expect salaries of as much as 10,000 euro monthly.

Political heavywheights in Bucharest are also resisting the lure of a European job as there are a lot more political players in Brussels than at home, which would make their individual role less important.

Evenimentul Zilei is much more interested in another issue - the increasing oil and gas tariffs practiced by Romanian oil company Petrom.

According to the newspaper, annexes to the privatization contract of Petrom allow buyer OMV to increase these tariffs as it likes, in the name of a more efficient activity, thus turning the Romanian population in the “payer” for the Petrom profit.

And Gandul reports a breakup in the presidential family.

After three year of marriage, President Traian Basescu’s daughter Ioana Basescu is divorcing singer Bogdan Marin (stage-named Bodo), A move that would complicate the status of their residence, an impressive residence where they lived based on a “promise” the house will be sold to them.