A senior US Treasury official has directly accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of corruption, in a BBC program that aired Monday.

A senior US Treasury official has directly accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of corruption, in a BBC program that aired Monday.

During a Panorama investigation into Putin's "secret riches", Adam Szubin, the acting under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US Treasury said Putin was a "picture of corruption".

"We've seen him enriching his friends, his close allies, and marginalizing those who he doesn't view as friends using state assets," Szubin, who oversees US Treasury sanctions, told the Panorama program, in an unusually strong statement from the government on Putin's personal finances.

"Whether that's Russia's energy wealth, whether it's other state contracts, he directs those to whom he believes will serve him and excludes those who don't. To me, that is a picture of corruption."

The US government has known about this for "many, many years", he added.
The program cited a secret CIA report from 2007 stating that Putin's wealth stood at around $40 billion (37 billion euros).

"He supposedly draws a state salary of something like $110,000 a year," said Szubin. "That is not an accurate statement of the man's wealth, and he has long-time training and practices in terms of how to mask his actual wealth."

Putin's spokesman told the BBC that "none of these questions or issues needs to be answered, as they are pure fiction".

Putin has previously scoffed at claims he was Europe's richest man, saying: "It's simply rubbish. They just picked all of it out of someone's nose and smeared it across their little papers."