RICH LISTS are a tricky subject.

“Forbes magazine does such an unprofessional job,” moans Alexander Lebedev in his Russian-inflected English, slumped in the corner of the Connaught Bar in London.

“Do you know they don’t even request any information from you? They diminished my fortune by half a billion. Now I am getting strange questions.”

He is certainly vexed, even if he still has a few billion to go. Just don’t call him an oligarch. “That’s misleading terminology,” he growls. “It has a very negative angle. Rich and bad.” Then he frowns behind thick, frameless glasses.

Lebedev, 48, is an odd one. White-haired, pale-faced, dressed in blue jeans, black tailcoat and designer plimsolls that gape without laces, he looks more like an impoverished waiter than a glitzy billionaire. Only his enormous Panerai watch flashes his wealth.

In fact, he is a super-bright, former KGB agent who made his £2 billion fortune from banking, not natural resources, and is now determined to prove that Russia’s rich men can have a conscience.

He is also a close friend of former president Mikhail Gorbachev and the owner of newspapers, airlines and property in Russia, as well as a string of luxury hotels across Europe, and is promising to buy more here as his National Reserve Corporation expands.

That’s if his determination to rock the boat at home doesn’t sink him first. He is so incensed about corruption in Russia — and the actions of “oligarchs” — that he has gone into politics and media to sort it out.

It was his Moscow Korrespondent newspaper that recently ran the story about Vladimir Putin’s alleged affair with a former Olympic gymnast.

Lebedev now acknowledges it was wrong, and promptly closed the paper. But there are, he says, dark forces at work.

Russia’s mafia hate him after he championed legislation limiting gambling. Oligarchs hate him, too, after he proposed a windfall tax on natural-resources billionaires. Then there are the state officials he accuses of corruption and those old spy bosses . . .

Oh great, what a good time to be sharing a drink with him, only 18 months after Alexander Litvinenko, another government critic and former KGB agent, was poisoned with polonium just round the corner.