Welcome to Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today lives in a grand villa in Nice on the French Riviera.

Now, it looks like a lifestyle that could be lifted from the pages of a glossy magazine, but the reality for Sergei Pugachov isn't quite as carefree as it might seem.

There's a clue in the armed security guards employed to offer him constant protection,

another in the fact that he doesn't want to meet me in his home,

but rather in the presidential suite of a luxury hotel.

Sergei Pugachov believes that Vladimir Putin is out to get him. Why? Well, because

Pugachov used to be a Putin confidant, a businessman who helped the little-known former KGB guy

from St. Petersburg make it all the way to the top, to the Kremlin. Pukachov was once dubbed Putin's banker.

He became a billionaire with assets from banking to shipbuilding to mining.

But then his bank ran into trouble.

He fell out with the Kremlin and he was accused of stealing a billion dollar loan from the Russian government.

He fled from Moscow first to

London and then after he was pursued in the UK courts by the Russian state to France, where he has

citizenship. His is an extraordinary story which shines a light into the dark corners of power

in Putin's Russia.

So what lessons can we learn?

Well, Sergei Pukchof joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

Hello, thank you for invitation.

It's a very great pleasure to meet you.

Let me start with something you said three years ago.

You said, theoretically, I think I am number three on Vladimir Putin's hit list. Do you still think that?

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