Sign up now for TIME's WorldWatch email newsletter. Millions of dollars slosh across Europe, moving surreptitiously from mysterious bank accounts to dummy companies in the tax haven of Liechtenstein.
Key executives vanish without a trace.
It all sounds like pulp fiction rather than high diplomacy. With the suddenness of a major earthquake, the investigation into financial irregularities by former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Union has rippled across Germany's borders to France and Switzerland, uncovering a widening trail of allegations about high-level influence peddling. The Christian Democrats had plenty of worries at home, too. Germany's biggest postwar political scandal showed no sign of ebbing, either. The flood of allegations, now coming out of France and Switzerland as well as a newly emboldened German press, could redraw Germany's political boundaries.