With his £850,000 home, smart car, top job and shares worth millions, finance director Dennis Lomas appeared to have it all.

But today the disgraced accountant's world was in tatters - jailed for his part in one of Britain's "worst commercial disasters"

Neighbours in Haywards Heath have spoken of their shock at Lomas's demise describing him as an honest man.

At London's Southwark Crown Court yesterday he was jailed for four years. In a trial lasting several weeks a jury was told how Lomas, along with 63-year-old company boss Michael Bright, and 48-year-old deputy managing director Philip Condon, covered up a £1 billion hole in company accounts at Independent Insurance.

The trio were found guilty of "dishonestly withholding claims data" by keeping official company information on whiteboards to keep it off their main systems.

Lomas and Bright were convicted of "making incomplete disclosure" of its re-insurance agreements between 1998 and 2001 - the year the company finally collapsed.

This concerned disclosing "good contracts" and concealing "bad" ones.

Lomas was a high flying finanace director and had shares worth £2.2 million in the company, which was one of Britain's biggest insurance companies.

With his colleagues he covered up the true extent the company was in trouble in a desperate bid to hold on to his job and to avoid the share price falling.

The eventual collapse of the company led to 1,000 job losses and £357 million handed out to some of the firm's 500,000 private and 40,000 corporate policyholders from City watchdog the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

Some who ended up on the dole queue also lost hard-earned savings invested in the company's "share and incentive" scheme.

Huge numbers of customers, including High Street names, were left without cover as the case sent shock waves through the insurance industry, and helped prompt the FSA to tighten regulation of the sector.

It was one of the most complex cases the Serious Fraud Office had ever investigated.

A woman at Lomas's red-brick home in leafy Balcombe Road said the family had "nothing to say" about the case.

A neighbour said: "I'm very surprised. I was only talking to him the other week.

"He seemed so honest. He mentioned a few months ago that he was made redundant from his work as an accountant."

Lomas was also banned from being a company director for ten years along with Condon, of Ashley Road, Sevenoaks, Kent, who was jailed for three years.

Bright, of Biddington Road, Smarden, Kent, was jailed for seven years and was disqualified from being a company director for 12 years.

The court heard in the four month trail that the trio knew the market value of the company, once the award-winning darling of the City, would plunge "dramatically" if full details of their losses ever became public knowledge.

Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, said the criminality which covered it up amounted to a "serious disease" of "prolonged and grave dishonesty".