An Unusual Incentive (With a sting in the tail)

Insurance agents, it is said, are premium lovers. This was certainly put to the test when a hundred intrepid German sales reps were offered 20 Hungarian prostitutes at a steamy evening in Budapest’s Gellért Baths as a reward for a successful year of selling policies.

Attaché cases and mobile phones were surrendered by the high-performing insurance experts at the entrance to the orgy. But even after they had stripped off their suits, the men from Hamburg-Mannheimer International — now part of the Munich Re group, the world’s biggest insurer — could not quite shed their office habits. As soon as they had made use of the services of one of the women, she would have her wrist rubber-stamped.

“That was how we established how popular each of the women was,” one of the participants told the German financial daily Handelsblatt. “Some ended the evening with more than a dozen stamps on their arms.”

As befits reps from Germany, Europe’s most insured nation, it was a rather orderly orgy. They queued for up to an hour in front of four-poster beds. Those who did not have the patience to stand in line were allowed to make love in the baths, providing that showers were taken before and afterwards. “Women were also made available back at the hotel,” one participant told the newspaper.

Handelsblatt became suspicious when the economist Leonhard Knoll posed a question about the purchase of prostitutes at the recent annual meeting of Munich Re, not normally an occasion for talking dirty.

The baffled chief executive, Nikolaus von Bomhard, asked his minions to research the matter. Soon it was confirmed that in 2007 Hamburg-Mannheimer had indeed paid for an “annual incentive trip for the very best salespeople and executives”.

The company was swallowed up three years later by Ergo, a subsidiary of Munich Re, so the top management could claim to be squeaky clean. But even the company’s in-house magazine had made sly references at the time to “a night not easily forgotten in Budapest”. Ergo admitted the jaunt and said that it had parted company with two senior executives responsible for the trip.

Unusually, the reps failed to read the smallprint. Most ended up having to pay an extra €3,000 (£2,600) to the German inland revenue for taking advantage of taxable pecuniary benefits.