A FORMER French model is to appear in a Geneva court today charged with murdering Edouard Stern, a powerful French banker, during a violent bondage game that she claims got out of hand.

The confession last week by Cecile Brossard, 36, daughter of a Paris advertising executive, that she shot dead M Stern, 50, in his bedroom at his Geneva flat has been greeted with relief in the discreet world of Swiss finance. The discovery two weeks ago of M Stern’s body, in a head-to-toe latex catsuit, had prompted speculation about a professional hit by rivals or gangsters.

Judge Michel-Alexandre Graber is to ask the court to keep its details secret while he continues his investigation into Mme Brossard’s motive.

M Stern, one of France’s richest men, died of four bullet wounds, including two to the head. He was bound in a harness that bore Mme Brossard’s fingerprints, police said.

“At this stage of the investigation, I am not ruling out the theory that the crime was carried out on someone’s orders,” the judge said yesterday. “The crime might have been committed for financial or personal reasons. There was a dispute over the sum of $1 million.”

Mme Brossard, who lived with a Swiss practitioner of alternative medicine in a luxurious lakeside apartment building, used the name “Alice” when playing her role as a sado-masochistic dominatrix.

French police reported that she had worked in the 1990s as one of the call-girls employed by Margaret Macdonald, the “English Madam”, who was sentenced to four years’ jail in Paris last year.

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