Paul Aherne

Expert in these Jurisdictions

British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda

Practice Areas

Paul Aherne is a partner in the Finance Group. Paul is highly regarded among the onshore banking community for being a technically strong lawyer who provides practical solutions in a responsive and commercial manner. Paul has been in the Asia Region for 17 years, the last 13 of those with Walkers. Paul spent 11 years of his career at Walkers in the firm's Hong Kong office, he relocated to Walkers' Singapore office in early 2022, however will be returning to Hong Kong from July 2024.

He has deep relationship with major law firms, investment and corporate banks and many private equity, private credit and corporate clients across the Asian market. Paul has a strong reputation for complicated financings involving detailed offshore structuring advice particularly in respect of fund finance, leveraged and acquisition finance, real estate finance and structured equity finance transactions.

He advised ESR Group Limited on the largest real asset manager in Asia Pacific powered by the New Economy and China Chem Group as Cayman Islands counsel on a HK$8.8 billion limited recourse green loan to their joint venture to develop and operate a prime cold storage and logistics facility in Kwai Chung, the first of its kind and largest to be built in Hong Kong in the last 20 years (please refer to detailed work highlights for more details).

Paul is seen to a go-to lawyer by the key international investment banks with significant structured equity finance businesses (particularly margin loans and equity derivatives). These deals tend to be confidential but are often complicated with very high value both to the bank and the bank's counterparty.

Paul leads the Firm's fund finance practice in the region. He regularly acts for the many of the most active lenders in the market as well for regional and global private equity, debt and real estate funds as borrowers of fund financing products.