A realistic formulation of approximate CP

CP violation in the SM is naturally implemented as a small imaginary perturbation to real Yukawa couplings. For example, a large CP asymmetry in B_d decays can arise if the imaginary parts of quark mass matrices are of order 10^(-3)m_t,b or smaller. Applying the same principle of ``additive CP violation'' to soft SUSY-breaking terms, the electric dipole moments of the neutron and mercury atom are predicted near current experimental limits; for nonuniversal A-terms, EDM bounds can be satisfied given certain flavour structures. The proposal is conveniently formulated in a democratic basis, with Yukawas and soft terms of the form const x (1+eps+i zeta) where eps<<1, zeta<~10^(-3), motivated by approximate permutation x CP symmetry.