Earlier this week Reuters ran a piece suggesting that Vodafone’s proposed $21.8 billion takeover of Liberty Global’s German and Eastern European assets will face a full EU antitrust investigation. The story came from a leak, so we can’t confirm or deny it. The piece said simply that the deal was likely to be referred for a longer, in-depth investigation. But there is a lot you can read into this, and hurried and harried phone calls will be carrying on in darkened corridors of German power, and indignant voices will be raised. We all know that this is a statutory step in approving a deal at the European level that would be refused at the German level. We suspect this deal…