We give a new approach to the failure of the Canonical Base Property (CBP) in the so far only known counterexample, produced by Hrushovski, Palacín and Pillay. For this purpose, we will give an alternative presentation of the counterexample as an additive cover of an algebraically closed field. We isolate two fundamental weakenings of the CBP, which already appeared in work of Chatzidakis and Moosa-Pillay and show that they do not hold in the counterexample. In order to do so, a study of imaginaries in additive covers is developed. As a by-product of the presentation, we observe that a pure binding-group-theoretic account of the CBP is unlikely.

In a stable theory, a stationary type $q \in S\left( A \right)$ internal to a family of partial types ${\cal P}$ over A gives rise to a type-definable group, called its binding group. This group is isomorphic to the group $Aut\left( {q/{\cal P},A} \right)$ of permutations of the set of realizations of q, induced by automorphisms of the monster model, fixing ${\cal P}\,\mathop \cup \nolimits \,A$ pointwise. In this article, we investigate families of internal types varying uniformly, what we will call relative internality. We prove that the binding groups also vary uniformly, and are the isotropy groups of a natural type-definable groupoid (and even more). We then investigate how properties of this groupoid are related to properties of the type. In particular, we obtain internality criteria for certain 2-analysable types, and a sufficient condition for a type to preserve internality.

If X and Y are orthogonal hyperdefinable sets such that X is simple, then any group G interpretable in X ∪ Y has a normal hyperdefinable X-internal subgroup N such that G/N is Y-internal; N is unique up to commensurability. In order to make sense of this statement, local simplicity theory for hyperdefinable sets is developed. Moreover, a version of Schlichting’s Theorem for hyperdefinable families of commensurable subgroups is shown.

The objective of this article is to characterise elimination of finite generalised imaginaries as defined in [9] in terms of group cohomology. As an application, I consider series of Zariski geometries constructed [10, 23, 24] by Hrushovski and Zilber and indicate how their nondefinability in algebraically closed fields is connected to eliminability of certain generalised imaginaries.