VLADIMIR Putin could be the world’s richest person with a stolen $US200 billion ($257 billion) fortune, a foreign investor claims.

Hermitage Capital Management CEO Bill Browder claims the Russian president stole billions from his country’s coffers and hid it in overseas accounts.

“I believe (Putin’s net worth) is $200 billion. After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn’t been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank — Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies,” Browder told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

That fortune would make Putin more than twice as wealthy as Bill Gates, the world’s richest person with a net worth of $US78.6 billion.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: I am not autistic

ANIMOSITY: Pictures that prove people hate Putin

Browder said he was once a supporter of Putin (Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in Russia) but was expelled from the country in 2005 after being considered a “threat to national security.”

The former “shareholder activist” claims in his new book, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice”, that Putin made a “deal” with wealthy oligarchs, promising to spare them jail time for “stealing profits from companies” if they shared their wealth with him.

He says when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were stealing from the state-run companies in which he was investing, Putin turned on him.

“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.

“The power is very simple in Russia — whoever has the power to arrest people is the person in power. And so what Putin does is he has a bunch of guys around him who have the power to arrest people.

“And so it doesn’t matter how rich you are, if you can be arrested, put in jail and have your money taken away, the guy who can do that to you is the most powerful person in Russia.”

Putin has been dogged by corruption claims for years, with The Guardian reporting in 2007 he owned vast holdings in three Russian oil and gas companies hidden behind a “non-transparent network of offshore trusts.”