Today’s winners and losers: surprise, it’s all about Opes

It’s easy to find losers from the spectacular decline of stockbroker Opes Prime – in fact, with more than 500 small and medium cap companies affected, it’s a struggle to find anyone not affected.

Top of the list, however, has to be those entrepreneurs who have seen their holdings in the businesses they built from scratch taken out from under them, such as Destra Corporation founder Dominic Carosa.

Carosa saw his shareholding in Destra stripped back heavily yesterday – that’s gotta hurt. See Amanda Gome’s interview with him today.

As for the winners, well, look no further than the lawyers. With one bit of litigation already on foot and others likely to follow, no doubt there will be a few law firms around town gearing up for a busy period.

Elders and Optus are also the clear losers from yesterday’s decision by the Government to cancel its $968 million contract with them to roll out wireless broadband in rural and regional Australia.

The decision has received mixed reviews from smaller telcos, but the one clear winner out of the decision is Telstra. Not only does it remove a potential competitor to its regional broadband infrastructure, it delivers a bop on the nose to Optus, the lead player in the G9 consortium that is shaping as Telstra’s main opposition for the upcoming $4.7 billion fibre to the node tender.