''Call-girl madam' has shamed family'

THE SISTER of Margaret McDonald, the woman accused of being the multi-millionaire madam at the heart of Europe's biggest callgirl ring, today said: "She is grasping and has brought shame to our family."

As French police continued to question 43-year-old McDonald in Paris, where she was arrested on Monday, her family described her as greedy and manipulative.

Her sister, Eileen Le Rossignol, said: "I don't like my sister one bit and haven't wanted anything to do with her over the past 20 years. I'm not really even surprised she is caught up in all of this.

"Margaret has only been back to England a few times over the past few years, usually for family bereavements, like when my father died over a year ago. But when she has come back she always asks for money. And now I hear she is earning a fortune from pimping."

She added: "My family don't want anything to do with her either. Margaret is not a nice person at all. I have seen her perhaps three times in the last 10 years."

Mrs Le Rossignol would not elaborate over what initially caused the rift between McDonald and the rest of the family 20 years ago but said: "This has devastated us and my poor, elderly mother is in a state of shock - and we don't even have anything to do with it."

Her 74-year-old mother, she said, was "ashamed" to leave her Windsor home. "She doesn't know how to handle it. I want to go and see my mother but she is adamant she won't talk about it and wants me to stay away. So she is all alone in her house.

"She has phoned me but when I try talking to her she just dissolves into tears. It's heartbreaking for her and a nightmare for us."

It is believed that McDonald, who was arrested in a Paris hotel by undercover detectives, has been running one of Europe's biggest call girl rings using a computer-based agency in London.

A former classmate described McDonald as "the kind of girl who was always breaking the rules and getting away with it".

Deborah Lindsey, 42, who was at Windsor High School with her in the 1970s, said: "She was a very strong character. She was the sort of person who was always on the wrong side of the rules, but getting away with it. My impression was that she did not work hard."

McDonald, however, has not always left such a memorable impression. Other contemporaries state that she failed to make an impression at all.

Former schoolmate Jayne Hosmer said: "I remember her name as you would anyone you went to school with, but I do not remember what she looked like. I think she was in the same year. She did not come to the school reunion."

Her mother, Tilly, was a shorthand typist who later became a schoolteacher. In 1957 she married fellow Scot John McDonald in Glasgow, an RAF sergeant who left the forces to work in technology, first as a quality controller, eventually as a company chief executive. The couple moved out of Halton RAF camp near Wendover in Buckinghamshire and eventually into a £600,000 fivebedroom Georgian-style house on a private estate in Windsor.

Margaret - who spells her own name "MacDonald" - was born in 1959. Her parents had their second daughter, Eileen, in 1961 and a son, Kenneth, five years later. Neighbours recall that Mr McDonald was a "very upright and devout Catholic who was keen to give his daughter a convent education".

First he sent her to St Edward's Convent school in Windsor. Then at the age of 12 he moved her to St Bernard's Convent in Slough.

McDonald transferred to Windsor High School in 1975 and two and a half years later started evening classes in pure maths at Windsor and Maidenhead College.

Then she spent 1983 and 1984 on a European business administration course at the Reims Management School, one of France's top business academies. Contemporary Bernd Sagers said: "She was a serious student, very talented and quite ambitious. When she graduated we all said that she would be a high-flier one day in the business world - but it's not quite the way we imagined."

After Reims she attended Greek, Japanese and Arabic classes at the Sorbonne to add to the German, French, Italian and Spanish she had already taught herself.

She told her family she had become a market researcher.