A US advertising executive is suing his former company for pressurising him to take part in the most extreme of team-bonding exercises - engaging in sex on the job.

Steve Biegel claims he was tricked into going to a brothel, instructed to strip naked in a bath with colleagues and was shown a series of pictures of women’s crotches including images of the tennis star Maria Sharapova taken by his boss.

Mr Biegel was the US creative director of Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising agency. He filed a lawsuit in Manhattan yesterday seeking unspecified damages from his former employers.

In the suit he claims that he and other company employees were put in awkward, sexually charged situations by his boss Toyo Shigeta, who he alleges was obsessed with taking photographs focused on the crotches of scantily clad women.

The chief executive officer of Dentsu Holdings USA is accused of taking repeated photographs of women on a beach in Brazil during a 2004 business trip. Mr Biegel claims his boss only stopped when he was threatened by one of the women’s male companions.

The suit claims Mr Shigeta then turned his attentions to a better known victim. Ms Sharapova was booked for a photo shoot for an advertisement for Canon. He is alleged to have attended the shoot in Key Biscayne, Florida and taken similarly compromising photographs of the Russian tennis player.

Exhibit B in the lawsuit filed at the Southern District Court of New York is a photograph showing Ms Sharapova apparently leaning over to pick something up.

The company said it would fight the lawsuit, which it described as a disgruntled former employee’s attempt to win “money to which he is not entitled.” In a statement, the advertising firm said Mr Biegel had never complained about the alleged incidents while working for the company.

“When Dentsu refused to yield to Mr Biegel’s unreasonable demands, he made outrageous allegations which the company has refuted,” Dentsu said.

Mr Biegel alleges that during another business trip in 2004, he travelled to the Czech Republic with Mr Shigeta for another advert for Canon.

He says that on one evening during the trip, his boss ordered him and another employee of the company to accompany him on an outing but refused to say where they were going.

The lawsuit alleges that the trip was in fact to a brothel in Prague which left Mr Beigel, who is married, humiliated and offended.

He says that when he refused to have sex with prostitutes, Mr Shigeta accused him of being “no fun” and later explained that it was a proper style of conducting business and celebrating business dealings.

Also in 2004, Mr Shigeta led a business trip to Tokyo. This time, he allegedly insisted that Mr Biegel and two other employees accompany him to a Japanese bath house.

Once there, Mr Biegel claims he was instructed to climb naked into a bath with his boss. “Once again, plaintiff was offended and humiliated by this outrageous, sexually degrading experience imposed on him as a condition of his employment,” the lawsuit said.

Mr Biegel says he confronted his boss in spring 2006, telling him he almost complained to human resources about the bath house experience and that, afterwards, Mr Shigeta’s attitude and demeanour changed completely and he was fired in November 2006.

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