PREDICTABLE CAR CRASH: The Qatargate scandal hasn’t exactly shocked long-term watchers of the European Parliament. Emilio De Capitani, who spent 26 years as a Parliament official before becoming a transparency campaigner, says the spiraling investigation into alleged influence-peddling by Qatar and Morocco is “not at all” a surprise.

Big is powerful: “The way the political groups in the European Parliament work is still very patchy and sometimes grants an excessive margin of discretion to the rapporteur or to the parliamentarian who is in charge of preparing an urgent resolution,” De Capitani told Playbook in an interview. Control and oversight by national delegations “is very limited and almost inexistent if the delegation is of a ‘big’ EU country or if the proposal has been negotiated by a ‘big’ parliamentary committee. This makes it practically impossible to verify what these MEPs are really doing,” he argues.

GOOD MORNING. This is Jacopo Barigazzi, POLITICO’s senior EU reporter, bringing you today’s Playbook from Milan. The Italian city is the other epicenter of the Qatargate scandal — Antonio Panzeri, the former Socialist MEP at the heart of the saga, is a very well-known figure in political circles in town in his capacity as a trade unionist. “I recall him as an hardliner…