| Cliff Stanford | |
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Photo of Cliff Stanford |
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| Born | 12 October 1954 London, England |
| Residence | Tervuren, Belgium |
| Nationality | British |
Cliff Stanford, an accountant from Southend-on-Sea, 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 with a capital of just £20,000.
Following the sale of Demon Internet to Scottish Telecom in 1998 for £66m, he founded Redbus Investments, 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 and Redbus Film Distribution. After a boardroom fall-out at Redbus Interhouse, he resigned in June 2002.[1]
In 2003, whilst attempting to gather information about possible wrong-doings by the board of Redbus Interhouse, Stanford discovered and exposed more than £34m of assets of Dame Shirley Porter[2] This resulted directly in her repaying £12m to Westminster Council.[3]
In September 2005 he was convicted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 of intercepting emails belonging to John Porter, son of Dame Shirley and then chairman of Redbus.[4]
Despite pleading guilty, Stanford claimed that what he had done was legal as "someone on the inside ... put in a redirect".[5] He was given a suspended sentence, ordered to pay a fine of £20,000 and, in a later hearing, was denied leave to appeal.[6]
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Cliff Stanford has one son, Tony Stanford and is currently in a relationship with Sylvia Spruck Wrigley[7] and stepfather to Connor Wrigley.
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 Speigel, who had for many years organised the entire annual Southend Easter chess congress, Stanford inaugurated an annual Jack Speigel Memorial Invitational Tournament, also at Easter and in Southend. The first Redbus event and the first Speigel 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.