THE jailed former boss of the company behind Poole's controversial Dolphin Quays development has been ordered to pay almost £41 million in a record confiscation order.

Gerald Smith, 52, had previously admitted embezzling funds from failed dot-com company Izodia.

The order is the largest ever applied to criminal proceedings and Smith was given 12 months to pay at the hearing at Inner London Crown Court.

Izodia will receive more than £5 million in compensation, while the Royal Bank of Scotland will be paid £21 million. Any failure to comply with the confiscation order will result in a default eight-year prison sentence for Smith, to run consecutively with his current term.

Smith, already serving eight years in prison, was a director of Orb, which bought the Poole Pottery site on the Quay and replaced it with the controversial Dolphin Quays complex.

Orb's empire crumbled in 2003 before Dolphin Quays had been completed, with Dolphin Quays and Poole Pottery going into administration only to be rescued by new owners.

Izodia was a company trading in computer software, but when the dot-com bubble burst, it became a cash shell.

Smith, through Jersey-based Orb, acquired a substantial stake in Izodia and was able to take control. He began diverting funds out of Izodia, the first slice being transferred to an account in Jersey in August 2002.

He then diverted the cash again and used it to pay off his loans, covering his tracks by producing false documents.

Smith plundered another £8 million between October and November 2002. The transfers were timed to meet bank deadlines for paying the interest on Orb's purchase on a number of Thistle Hotels.

In 1993, Smith had been sentenced to two years in jail for defrauding the pension scheme of a company he owned in a failed bid to keep them afloat.

Smith was declared bankrupt in November 2005 and in April 2006 he pleaded guilty to 10 charges of theft and one of false accounting.