BY all accounts, her good looks were not her greatest asset. Julia Lemigova, a former Soviet model and beauty queen, also had an exceptional ear for languages, a good nose for business and an ability to make friends in all the right places.
Edouard Stern, a prominent banker, was her lover and the investigation into his murder in Geneva on February 28 has taken a dramatic twist with her claims of a link between the crime and the death of her baby five years ago.
Stern, 50, who had made many enemies in his successful career, was found dressed in a latex body stocking in his flat. It looked like a professional “hit” until Cécile Brossard, his 36-year-old mistress, confessed to shooting him four times in a “crime of passion” after they had argued about money.
Last week, however, that scenario was challenged by Lemigova. She claimed to have been Stern’s mistress long before and suspected that Brossard might have been using blackmail to get at his money.
Lemigova was the last Miss Soviet Union before its collapse and her beauty evoked comparisons with Julia Roberts, the American actress. In addition to Russian, this strong-willed Red Army colonel’s daughter also speaks flawless Italian, English and French and has counted among her friends such titans of finance as the late Sir James Goldsmith.
She met Stern, who was born into one of Europe’s oldest banking families, at a dinner in 1997 and the financier was immediately smitten. There followed a weekend at Stern’s chateau in Burgundy and trysts in hotels all over the world.
Mad about big game hunting and guns, Stern took Lemigova on shooting courses in Geneva, where they learnt to fire a Kalashnikov rifle. In a possible sign of how seriously he took the relationship, he even asked her to meet his psychoanalyst.
After completing a course in business administration in Paris, Lemigova got a job at a bank in Geneva in 1998 as head of Russian investments, just as Stern was making his first deals in Russia. By then he had divorced his wife Beatrice, an art historian by whom he had three children and whose father headed Lazard, the investment bank.
In 1999 Lemigova told Stern that she was pregnant but he was apparently never fully convinced that the child was his. Lemigova believes that Stern, who through often brilliant transactions had amassed a fortune of £540m, put her under surveillance. Her son Maximilien was born in New York in October that year.
Stern continued visiting Lemigova when she set up home in a chic part of Paris.
In early 2000, when the boy was five months old, she placed an advertisement on a church noticeboard for a nanny. A Bulgarian woman appeared on her doorstep asking for work. A few days later Maximilien fell seriously ill. He died in hospital on March 10.
Doctors found internal injuries which suggested that he could have been shaken. Lemigova, the nanny and Stern, who had spent an hour in Lemigova’s flat on the day the baby was taken to hospital, were questioned by an examining magistrate. The nanny subsequently disappeared.
Lemigova wonders now whether the baby’s death was accidental or if the nanny was paid to murder him. In 2002 the magistrate closed the file for lack of evidence. Swiss investigators are expected to ask the French to reopen it.
Lemigova continued to see Stern occasionally but the relationship was never the same. Last year she told the Nouvel Observateur magazine in Paris that he had tried to revive their affair even though he was involved with Brossard. She had turned him down, saying: “You have made me suffer too much.”
Then came a telephone call from Brossard, who was reported to have worked as a luxury call girl, asking for a meeting in a Paris restaurant. Lemigova claims that Brossard pumped her for information about her relationship with Stern, including details of their sex life. At one point, claims Lemigova, Brossard offered to tell her “the truth about the death of your son”.
Lemigova thinks that Brossard, an artist who met Stern at a dinner party in 2001, used her information about the child’s death to blackmail Stern.
Earlier this year Stern transferred £700,000 into a Credit Suisse bank account in Brossard’s name. A few days before his murder, however, he froze the money with a restraining order.
Lawyers representing his family describe the money as a down payment on eight Chagall paintings that Brossard had acquired for him. Brossard’s lawyer disputes this, saying the money was seen by her as a gift intended to give her financial independence. “I don’t know why he took it back,” Brossard allegedly told her lawyer.
She said that he had also gone back on promises of marriage and portrays herself as a victim of abusive behaviour by an aggressive man who famously sacked his father after taking control of the Stern family’s bank in 1977 when he was 22.
She said she was invited to Stern’s flat on February 28 and they argued about the money. Stern changed the subject and they had sex. Stern’s unusual attire on the night of the murder was linked to the couple’s penchant for sado-masochism, according to her lawyer.
Another argument broke out. Brossard lost control and, in a moment of fury, grabbed a gun that he kept in a drawer. Stern, who was convinced that his life was in danger and had a permit to carry a concealed weapon, possessed a number of guns and Brossard knew where they were hidden because he would often ask her to handle them.
Later she threw the weapon into Lake Leman, where police found it. Forensic tests have proved that the four bullets retrieved from Stern’s body were fired from this weapon.
If convicted of a “crime of passion”, Brossard could be jailed for one to 10 years. Premeditated murder would carry a much heavier sentence.
