The first facility
Everything else on this site is general. This page is the specific thing your money would fund at launch, and the specific reasons it might not perform.
A disclosure note before the detail. The originating documents are marked private and confidential and name third parties — the obligor group, the fronting insurer, the reinsurer, the listing venue. Those names are the issuer's to disclose, not this documentation's, so counterparty identity is available under NDA rather than published here. Everything else — structure, size, tenor, protection, and every place the marketing runs ahead of the documents — is set out in full below.
The trade being financed
A vertically integrated precious-metals group buys doré bars and scrap at source from mines and suppliers in West Africa and the Gulf, paid in cash on the spot; refines them at its own plant to 999.9 and mints them under its own hallmark; and sells refined metal to bullion banks, wholesalers and refiners across the Gulf, Hong Kong and India.
The group earns the refining margin and the physical spread between metal at source and refined metal in the Gulf — explicitly not the direction of the gold price. Cash then returns to the buying desk and the next lot is purchased.
The binding constraint on that business is cash, not demand. Buying closer to source and in larger lots is where the margin improves, and that is precisely what the facility funds.
The instrument
| Term | Value |
|---|---|
| Programme size | USD 300,000,000 |
| Tranching | USD 10m · 40m · 250m |
| Instrument | Secured credit-linked note |
| Listing | Listed on a European exchange, Euroclear-eligible, with an ISIN |
| Tenor | 5 years |
| Asset yield | 9–12% per annum (the deck states 10–15% elsewhere — see below) |
| Use of proceeds | One leg only: the purchase of physical gold |
No proprietary positions and no general corporate use. Metal bought with the money becomes the collateral pool, held in the obligor's name and monitored by a firm the insurers appoint, paid for by the borrower.
The protection stack, and where it is thinner than advertised
The deck presents four layers that must fail before a dollar is lost. Three of them hold as described. The fourth does not, and it is the one most likely to be relied on.
| # | Layer | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The obligor services the note out of group cash flow | As described |
| 2 | Failing that, the monitored collateral pool is realised, noteholder senior | As described |
| 3 | A non-payment policy triggers on failure to pay, insolvency, restructuring or acceleration, settling after a 90-day waiting period | Materially narrower than described |
| 4 | A cut-through clause lets the noteholder claim straight from the reinsurer | Not established for the holder |
What the documents actually say. The deck states the policy covers the full USD 300m and that the holder has direct recourse to a rated balance sheet. The project's own later analysis, working from the policy itself, records that the first-tranche policy names a different insured and a USD 10m insured amount, that those policy rights cannot be assigned to a third party without the leading insurer's approval, and that loss-payee status requires an approved endorsement. Its own instruction is not to promise direct insurance rights the documents have not granted.
Treat layer 4 as not granted until an endorsement naming the intended beneficiary exists, and layer 3 as sized to the tranche rather than to the programme. This is the single largest gap between claim and document in the whole package, and it is why it appears first in risks.
Layer 3 carries a second problem independent of its size: the 90-day waiting period is a liquidity event. It reduces ultimate credit loss while leaving a severe short-term cash hole, and the model carries that delay as an explicitly excluded parameter rather than a solved one.
Concentration
At launch there is one facility. One vehicle per facility is a legal requirement rather than a preference — pooling triggers the fund regime — so early holders are exposed to:
- one obligor group
- one commodity
- one refinery and one custody chain
- one jurisdiction for enforcement
There is no portfolio effect. Every mitigation in the protection stack reduces severity; none reduces concentration. A single obligor failing is not a tail scenario in this structure — it is the scenario.
The stated pipeline beyond this facility is aggregate originated capacity exceeding USD 875m across gold, silver and copper, sourced through the same relationships. That is an assertion in the deck; nothing on this site independently verifies it, and no additional facility has closed.
What qualifies for the reserve
The deck's own eligibility test, which is a good test and worth holding the issuer to:
- secured on physical goods that already exist
- protected at the credit layer by insurance or hard asset cover
- self-liquidating from a contracted sale
- documented well enough that an allocator can verify it independently
Facilities failing any one are not funded, however attractive the coupon. Note that criterion 4 is the one this documentation is built to make checkable — see verify the reserve.
What is verified, and what is asserted
| Fact | Status |
|---|---|
| Programme size, tranching, instrument type, tenor, listing | Deck-sourced, hashed in the economic source registry |
| Asset yield 9–12% | Deck-sourced — and contradicted by the same deck's 10–15% elsewhere |
| Group scale, refining throughput, operating footprint | Deck-asserted. Not independently verified here |
| First-tranche insured amount and named insured | Document-sourced, and narrower than the deck |
| Originated capacity beyond this facility | Deck-asserted. No second facility has closed |
| Operator margin per cycle and cycle length | Unmeasured — the two numbers the unit economics turns on |
Named counterparty detail, the facility documents, the policy and the monitoring appointment are available under NDA. Nothing on this page should be read as a substitute for reading them.