Today’s nostalgic, those-were-the-days, boys-will-be-boys story from the high-flying world of what finance was all about back when the Krug flowed like water and it was the I-banks printing money and not the Fed, comes [huh huh] to us straight out of Düsseldorf, where a leading financial newspaper has gotten a (somewhat belated) scoop on some down and dirty frolicking. What sordid thing went down at Ergo Versicherungsgruppe, Germany’s second-biggest primary insurer after Allianz (and a fully owned sub of Munich Re)? We’re told they hired hookers:

No, wait, that’s not right. T.J. Hooker ceased to be relevant about twenty-five years ago. Maybe it was…

Unfortunately, John Lee Hooker has passed, so it couldn’t have been him either. I guess I’ll just let Bloomberg tell you:

A Munich Re unit hosted about 20 prostitutes at a Budapest party to reward the insurer’s high- performing agents, a spokesman said. The incident in the summer of 2007 was a “clear violation” of company policy, said Alexander Becker, a spokesman for the Ergo Versicherungsgruppe subsidiary, in a telephone interview yesterday. Senior management involved in organizing the event are no longer employed at Ergo, he said.

Yeah, it sounds like there was clearly something being violated. Granted, the world’s oldest profession is not only legal in Hungary but it’s also unionized, so we’re going to go ahead and assume this is strictly a business ethics issue. But we know all you really want are the scandalous details, such as how you could figure out which girls were all about getting a versicherunsgruppe on your handelsblatt:

Ergo hosted the party for about 100 guests at the historic Gellert spa, Handelsblatt reported in a preview of an article to be published today. Women wore color-coded armbands, the newspaper said, citing unidentified guests, with red for hostesses, yellow for those available for sexual favors and white for women reserved for executives and top agents. After each trip to beds set up near the thermal baths, a woman would receive a stamp on her forearm, the paper reported.

That’s some highly detailed party planning right there. (Also: 20 girls and 100 guests? That’s a lot of stamps, ick.) A company spokesperson indicated that all the involved parties left the company well before the details of this case were known, so we’d love to know if they’ve taken any of their event-management talent to their new firms, and what they’ve been spending the company ca$h on there.