Michael Bright, the disgraced former head of Independent Insurance, was on Wednesday night starting a seven-year jail sentence over a huge fraud that helped cause one of the biggest corporate collapses of the decade.

Dennis Lomas, former finance director, was sentenced to four years in prison and Philip Condon, former deputy managing director, to three years for their roles in a scam that hid hundreds of millions of pounds of losses from investors, policyholders and employees.