Anna Chapman, the woman at the heart of a Russian spy ring which used Malta as one of its passwords, also worked for a Maltese financial operator in London, according to UK media.
Chapman is one of 11 people accused by the United States of working for years as secret agents for Russia's intelligence service, the SVR.
The British media have spoken of how her life changed suddenly, to the extent that people who knew her hardly recognised her character any more.
Chapman, 28, was, in 2005, the personal assistant of Nicholas Camilleri, chief executive of the Mayfair-based hedge fund company Navigator Asset Management Advisers.
There is no suggestion that Chapman obtained any information from the businessmen she mixed with.
Camilleri told The Guardian that he found it hard to picture the 23-year-old girl he employed as a PA in 2005 as a Russian spy.
"She was a 'green, wet behind the ears' type of girl," he said. "She came across as having none of those sorts of spying-type aspirations, so I can't see how she developed them later."
Her former husband, Alex Chapman, 30, from Bournemouth, Dorset, spoke earlier in the week of his suspicions that she was being "conditioned" by shadowy contacts during their marriage.
However his father Kevin told the Daily Mail that the girl depicted in the press was "just not her".
"I always liked the girl and still do," he said. "If there is any grain of truth in all of this, then I think Anna was either set up or seduced into something because of the glamour. I feel very sorry for her. She must be feeling very frightened right now."
He said he had been pleased when she married his son in a secret ceremony in Russia in 2002, following a six-month romance, insisting she ticked all the boxes.
"She was a very pleasing daughter-in-law and they were talking about having kids. I don't know why they split up," he added.
But his son shed light on the marriage, telling the Daily Telegraph that his wife's personality unexpectedly changed during their time together.
The trainee psychiatrist was married to the Russian, maiden name Kushchenko, for four years before they divorced in 2006.
"There was such a dramatic change in the way she thought and the way she went about things, I felt I hardly knew her any more," he said.
"It was like someone having a mid-life crisis, but in their 20s. She would arrange to go out but when I said I would join her she told me not to bother because they would all be speaking Russian. She was adamant I wasn't to meet them.
"She had never been materialistic during the years we were together, but in 2005 and 2006 after she started having these meetings with people she referred to as 'Russian friends'. She was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting."