Over the next few years here will be many legal battles that over the Opes Prime client shareholdings and who actually owned them. Lets say the final verdict indicates that Opes owned the shares outright when clients lodged them with them. What will be the effect on the many hundreds of voting actions that clients particiated in? Will these votes then be open to legal challenges?
There are many companies where between 10-50% of the shares were being held in Opes accounts. I wonder if there was a close vote on a sensitive issue that would have went the other way if the "Opes" votes were ruled inelgibile due to the fact that the people making the votes didn't in fact own the shares.
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If Opes claim they had legal unencumbered title of the clients shares, there is no way the clients legally could vote, lodge substantial shareholder notices, etc. But this was NOT the case. This is a very 'grey' area and there are big inconsistencies between what is said in the FSG and what is said on the OP website.
if person ABC held X out of Y shares under "XYZ Nominees" and wanted to vote at an AGM, then XYZ Nominees would vote X shares on the clients behalf. Happens at every custodian, and there is no issue here.
So what about substantial shareholder notices. Why were clients allowed by ASIC to lodge these as 'beneficial owner' and not ANZ Nomineees or Opes?
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