We work in the category of locally definable groups in an o-minimal expansion
of a field. Eleftheriou and Peterzil conjectured that every definably generated
abelian connected group G in this category is a cover of a definable group. We
prove that this is the case under a natural convexity assumption inspired by
the same authors, which in fact gives a necessary and sufficient condition. The
proof is based on the study of the zero-dimensional compatible subgroups of G.
Given a locally definable connected group G (not necessarily definably
generated), we prove that the n-torsion subgroup of G is finite and that every
zero-dimensional compatible subgroup of G has finite rank. Under a convexity
hypothesis we show that every zero-dimensional compatible subgroup of G is
finitely generated.Comment: Final version. 17 pages. To appear in Selecta Mathematic