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Russian President Vladimir Putin reacts after peace talks on resolving the Ukrainian crisis in Minsk, February 12, 2015. The leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine have agreed a deal to end fighting in eastern Ukraine, participants at the summit talks said on Thursday. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko

One of Russia's largest foreign investor has claimed President Vladimir Putin has managed to amass some $200 billion of stolen wealth, making him the richest man in the world so far.

Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, said Mr Putin has hundreds of billions of dollars stashed away in probably various overseas accounts. Browder told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that the Russian leader accumulated his ill-gotten wealth in the first 10 years of his presidency. “The first eight or 10 years of Putin's reign over Russia, it was about stealing as much money as he could.” Mr Putin has been the President of Russia from 2000 to 2008, and again since May 2012. Putin was also Prime Minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000 and again from 2008 to 2012.

Browder, who admitted being once supporter of Mr Putin but was expelled from the country after being labelled a “threat to national security” in 2005, said the leader’s net worth is $200 billion, if only to base “the amount of money that hasn’t been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on.” He said the missing money can be found in properties and in banks, “Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies.”

If Browder’s allegations are true, that will make Bill Gates, the world’s recognised richest person, fail miserably beside Mr Putin. Gates’ net worth is $US78.6 billion

Mr Putin allegedly got rich because he entered into various deals with wealthy oligarchs. He allegedly told them he would spare them jail time if they shared their wealth with him. Browder said Mr Putin turned on him when he threatened to expose the corrupt oligarchs and their theft from the state-run companies in Russia.

“What I didn’t realise then, and it’s become absolutely plain and obvious to me now, based on my experience, is that Putin wasn’t above it all, Putin was intimately involved in it all, and it wasn’t like he was restraining the oligarchs -- he was the biggest oligarch. And everything that he’s done since then has come to prove that,” Browder told CNN.

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