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John Walker

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John is Chair of the Australian offices and has been a partner at Baker McKenzie for almost 20 years, and head of the tax group for most of that time. John has held a variety of global, regional and local management roles and is currently a member of the firm’s Management Committee. John is widely recognised as one of Australian leading tax lawyers, including in various editions of the Australian Financial Review’s Best Lawyers, Chambers Asia Pacific, APL 500, Euromoney's International Tax Review's World Tax and the Tax Directors Handbook and was last year’s Lawyers Weekly Tax Lawyer of the Year. He writes and teaches broadly, and is currently a lecturer in the Sydney University LLM program and a writer for Thompson’s loose leaf income tax service and the author of BNA Buchanan Ingersoll PC’s Tax Management: Business Operations in Australia. He is also the head of the Firm's Structured Assets group in Australia, which incorporates the Tax, Financial Services, Commercial Real Estate and Hotels, Resorts & Tourism groups.

Cross-border lending in Asia Pacific continues to grow steadily despite external factors such as COVID-19. While the region is not immune to external factors, borrowing volumes for financial institutions, credit funds and other market participants remain high in Asia Pacific. Considering the demographics of many of the nations, the various financial centers and many market participants investing more substantially in some of those financial centers, we remain optimistic that lending activity across Asia Pacific will continue to grow.

The Australian Treasury has released an exposure draft of legislation, which, if implemented, would require operators of electronic platforms to report to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) identification and payment information regarding the sellers that participate on their platforms (“Sellers”).