An official of the U.S. Department of Treasury has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being corrupt, per BBC News. The U.S. government has already made some moves on several Putin supporters, but it it the first time that it has directly accused the Russian president 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. 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," Adam Szubin of the U.S. Treasury said.

Szubin took part in BBC Panorama's investigation of the Russian leader's secret wealth. He noted that the U.S. government has knowledge of Putin's corruption for many years. Although he directly told the British news outlet about his accusations, Szubin declined to comment on a 2007 secret CIA report about Putin's secret wealth that was estimated to be worth more than $40 billion.

"He supposedly draws a state salary of something like $110,000 a year. 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," Szubin said.

In a report by Yahoo! News, Putin declared back in that his earned assets in 2014 only include a total of 3.7 million Russian rubles or equivalent to $104,000. He also declared ownership to a 77-square-meter apartment, a garage, a piece of land and three Russian-made cars.

The figure is one of the lowest among Russian officials despite many of his ministers having luxury vehicles and mansions all over Europe. Putin has also denied the report that he is the wealthiest man in Europe.

"It's simply rubbish. They just picked all of it out of someone's nose and smeared it across their little papers," Putin said.

According to The Independent, the 63-year-old leader is the mastermind in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. He is a former Russian Federal Security Service agent and one of the well-known detractors of Putin that was killed in London back in 2006 via radioactive polonium poisoning.

It is not the first time that Putin has been accused of corruption, per The Guardian. He allegedly received one-third of the $50 billion budget of the 2014 Winter Games held in Sochi, a claim Putin has denied. Russia's former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov even accused his rival of getting more than $30 billion of the budget.