Wearing a maroon dinner jacket, Melbourne rich lister Craig Silbery outbid everyone at cancer fundraiser

A Bayside probiotic entrepreneur turned gourmet dog food developer turned heads when he upped the ante at a recent fundraiser for cancer patients.

Charlie Carrington and Craig Silbery from Dine With Your Dog.

We all know rich listers are notorious for having long pockets and short hands.

But if anyone can get them to dig deep, it’s Hamish McLachlan.

There really is no one quite like handsome Hame who can guilt trip our cashed up cubs, silver spooners and corporate purse string holders, to cough up for a good cause when up on the MC platform.

Take Sony Foundation’s annual River4Ward fundraising luncheon on Thursday at Crown Aviary to raise much needed funds for the You Can Centre in support of cancer patients.

“You all have too much money,” Hame quipped to the affluent crowd.

Suddenly the media stations, and they were all there, were furiously bidding in an effort to outdo each other as to who was the most charitable, offering up to $10,000 a pop.

Hame artfully pushed this along dubbing it the “network wars”.

But it was the hand raised from a seemingly innocuous man in a maroon dinner jacket that had everyone talking when he casually outbid the lot, doubling the ante with a cool $20,000.

Next up was the auction items and our mystery bidder was suddenly taking home a trip to the US and another one to the Maldives, clocking up his total lunch spend to more than $50,000.

If anyone can get rich listers to dig deep, it’s Hamish McLachlan.

After hearing Melbourne had fallen short of the $650,000 Brisbane had raised at a luncheon earlier, Silbery than topped up the coffers with Melbourne claiming victory at $651,000.

Page 13 had to of course go sniffing and turns out our Bayside benefactor is none other than dog lover Craig Silbery.

Having made a motsa selling his Life-Space Probiotics company to Chinese dietary giant By-Health in 2018 for $700m, Silbery got bored of early retirement so set up passion pooch project Ilume.

The company is now on a mission to make man’s best friend live longer, moving into the space of “health pet tech” and producing “human grade food” for dogs which includes turkey medallions with spinach mousse.

Asked about his charity splurge he shrugged and said it was for a good cause and resonated with his wife Lauren whose father had recently died from cancer.

Random fact, we all know Melbourne is six degrees of separation, his former wife Isabelle was one third of the multi-generational ‘Silbery ladies’ on Gogglebox.