Revelations about company wrongdoings and insider trading are not particularly new in Germany.
But a recent steady stream of sometimes lurid allegations about kickbacks, bribery and sexual favors involving several of the leading companies in Europe's biggest economy have struck at the heart of the country's powerful corporate sector.
Just as German carmaker Volkswagen AG is battling to contain a burgeoning bribery and sex scandal, business in the nation has this week been rocked by fresh allegations of corruption, this time focused on chipmaker Infineon AG, which electronics giant Siemens spun off as separate unit in 1999 and is Europe's biggest semiconductor maker.
But with claims that the recent allegations of executive misdeeds could just be the tip of the iceberg, the revelations currently gripping the nation's business sector threaten to result in moves to clean-up the country's corporate sector emerging as an issue in Germany's early election, set down for mid-September.
Already signs have begun to emerge that the scandals could trigger a revolution in Germany's labor and corporate culture, possibly resulting in big changes to the way business is done in the nation.
VW's new star board member Wolfgang Bernard has already announced a major new 10 billion euro (US$12 billion) restructuring plan that industry analysts say will pave the way for job cuts at Europe's biggest carmaker and to break up the group's previous close management and union ties.
On Thursday Volkswagen said it was paying the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh almost 2 billion euro in damages following what the carmaker said were "allegedly illegal actions" of a former VW executive in negotiations over a planned factory in the state.
In the case of Infineon, the scandal comes at a difficult time for the company as it weighs up whether to press ahead with a new share sale later this year which could be overshadowed by a state prosecutor's probe of corruption, fraud and tax evasion involving a former key manager of the company.
The weekend resignation of Andreas von Zitzewitz, the chief operating officer of Infineon's key memory-chip business, amid allegations concerning payments totalling about 259,000 euro for motorsport sponsorship, follows in the wake of a series of high-profile departures from Volkswagen amid claims that key officials sought kickbacks from potential suppliers.
More recently, however, with both an internal probe and public prosecutor's investigation underway, claims have emerged about how the carmaker attempted to keep workers' representatives and political leaders on side by providing them with so-called pleasure trips.
This included entertaining them with a stream of high-class call girls, many of whom have been named in the German press along with pictures of what was alleged to be a popular bordello (Sex World) used by VW executives to entertain union representatives and members of the nation's ruling Social Democrats.
According to the wife of one of the VW executives who has been forced to stand down, the former chief of VW's Skoda operations in the Czech Republic, Helmuth Schuster, the carmaker regularly gave its senior executives the male impotence drug Viagra when they were traveling on company business.
While Germany's financial capital Frankfurt and companies have been frequently caught in allegations of insider-trading scams, scandals involving the country's top corporations have been relatively rare.
But earlier this year Mercedes-Benz, one of Germany's flagship companies and a pillar of the nation's key car sector, was forced to launch a major shake-up of its sales operations after reports of how a senior Mercedes-Benz official used the company's building department to help construct a home for his girlfriend on the Spanish resort island of Majorca. The executive has now left the company.
In the meantime, the state prosecutor's office in Stuttgart, where Mercedes-Benz's parent company DaimlerChrysler AG is based, has launched an investigation into fraud at the luxury carmaker's sales operations.
At the same time, German supermarket chain Rewe has been seeking damages from its former chief Dieter Berninghaus after he allegedly bought shares in an Internet firm and then resold then on to Rewe at a profit.
Last September Infineon was already making headlines after it admitted in a US court that it had engaged in price-fixing and was fined US$160 million. The fine was the third-largest price-fixing penalty in US history.
The latest scandal to hit corporate Germany follows allegations that 45-year-old von Zitzewitz received kickbacks for handling sponsorship contracts with Infineon suppliers for a Swiss marketing company, BF Consulting GmbH.
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