Siemens continues to try to clean itself up and move on from the bribery scandal but the elaborate money trail suggests it's not going to be that easy.

Last week, the company sacked Siemens Hellas chairman Michalis Christoforakos in connection with allegations about the awarding of a major security contract for the Athens 2004 Olympics.

The company is remaining tight-lipped about the sacking so that it won't give this scandal any more oxygen.

But the elaborate money trail, detailed here in The Wall Street Journal, reveals that the money was being filtered through Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which until recent years had impregnable banking-secrecy laws. Perfect places for secret payments. And none of this would have been discovered had it not been for osama bin laden.

According to the WSJ, the illicit transactions were picked up by auditors for a bank owned by Liechtenstein's royal family. Looking out for possible terrorist transactions post 9/11, they discovered that Martha Overseas Corp, a company controlled by Prodromos Mavridis, a top executive in Greece with Siemens, was pumping millions of euros into the account from another offshore firm controlled by a different Siemens executive based at the company's Munich headquarters.

Swiss authorities have since frozen hundreds of millions of euros in bank accounts they believe are connected to Siemens. But more than half the money hasn't been claimed by anyone.

Despite Siemens' best efforts, this case will go on and on.