Cliff Stanford
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Cliff Stanford, an accountant from London, was a co-founder of Demon Internet, the first Internet Service Provider in the United Kingdom for individual subscribers. Stanford had spotted what he thought was a real business opportunity to profit from the incipient demand for access to the internet, and started Demon off in the boiler room of a cinema with a borrowed £20,000.
Following the sale of Demon to Scottish Power in 1999 for (UKP) £66M, he founded Redbus, a venture capital firm involved in film production and a variety of other ventures. Redbus Investments provided seed capital for a number of investments including Redbus Interhouse. After a boardroom fall-out at Redbus Interhouse, he resigned in June 2002.
In September 2005 he was convicted of spying on John Porter, the ex-chairman of Redbus Interhouse, specifically hacking into his e-mail account. After pleading guilty, he was given a suspended sentence, ordered to pay a fine of £20,000, and in a later hearing was denied leave to appeal.
Stanford is a chess enthusiast who had sponsored a REDBUS knockout Grandmaster chess event each Easter in Southend, commencing in 1999. Following the death of his uncle, Jack Spiegel, who had for many years organised the entire annual Southend easter chess congress, Stanford inaugurated an annual Jack Spiegel Memorial Invitational Tournament, also at Easter and in Southend. The first Redbus event and the first Spiegel Memorial event were each won by James Plaskett. In 1999 Stanford also advanced funds to enable Plaskett to search for a giant octopus off the Bermudan coast.
