Gerald Smith, a doctor-turned-financier who is serving eight years in prison for defrauding an internet business, was ordered to surrender £41 million yesterday in the largest confiscation order in British criminal proceedings.

Smith, who was convicted of a “complex and brazen” fraud last year, must pay £41,959,911 within 12 months or face a further eight years in jail.

Although he was previously convicted of stealing about £35 million, a judge at Inner London Crown Court issued a confiscation order for the higher amount to include interest since the 2002 fraud.

Izodia, the company at the heart of the scam, will be paid £21.4 million from the confiscated proceeds with the Jersey operation of the Royal Bank of Scotland International, another victim of the fraud, due to receive £5.3 million.

The remaining £14 million will be paid to the Treasury.

Smith, a qualified GP, was given two consecutive four-year jail sentences and banned from being a company director for 15 years for his role in the fraud at Izodia, a former dot-com stock market sensation known as InfoBank.

The judge said that Smith, who pleaded guilty to ten charges of theft and one count of false accounting at a Serious Fraud Office-led prosecution in April, would be freed from jail on licence after serving half his prison term.

The court heard how Smith, 51, used the stolen money to buy a yacht and pay off interest on business loans.

In 2002, Smith, a director of Orb, a now-defunct Jersey-based investment group, proposed turning the software firm into a property vehicle. Later it emerged that Izodia’s single major asset, a £33 million cash pile, was missing and had been transferred to Mitre Property Management, a unit of Orb, on Smith’s orders.

Smith then siphoned off the cash and tried to conceal the fraud by supplying Izodia’s directors with false paperwork.

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