According to a report in the Huffington Post, some world leaders may be richer than most people might imagine.
The list puts Russian President Vladmir Putin at the top, with a net worth of $40 billion, followed by the King of Thailand at $30 billion and the Sultan of Brunei at $20 billion.
A surprising memeber of the club is India’s Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress Party, who is 12th with a reported $2 billion net worth, and is believed to be richer than British Queen Elizabeth II, Sultan of Oman Qaboos bin Said and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
According to India’s National Election Watch website of the Association for Democratic Rights, Gandhi had, during the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, declared assets worth Rs.1.38 crore, just over $250,000. She also declared that she neither owned a car nor had a house in India.
The Huffington Post compared each country’s GDP per capita juxtaposed with a leader’s personal net worth, illustrating the growing disparity between a country’s elites and its average citizens.
A significant fraction of the list is dominated by leaders from the Middle East, with seven of the 20 leaders belonging to that region.
The HuffingtonPost report does not clearly state how it calculated the figures, but states that it based the figures on “available data”.
Sonia Gandhi among richest world leaders: report
