Investing in RCB and Belong bonds

I received an email from Retail Charity Bonds (RCB) about an offer to buy bonds relating to the charity, Belong.  Belong provides shelter and care services to people.

Neither provides a telephone number for retail investors to contact them for information, but RCB does provide contact details if you're either a borrower or a prof investor.  RCB's favouritism for speaking only to certain kinds of people is distasteful.  Belong is not helping ordinary folk by only allowing online enquiries and insisting enquirers state a location.  The locations listed on its form, from which I had to choose one, were irrelevant so I ended up selecting one from the list and telling them it was used only to enable me to send the form.

I sent my online enquiry and asked the Belong FD why his charity was prepaying its 4.5% bond due Jun 2026 with a bond paying 7.5% due 2030.  Paying the additional interest of £1,500,000 on £50,000,0000 of debt makes no sense to me.  The prepayment sounded suspicious to me so I wanted an answer.  Not sure they'll bother to reply or if they do, they'll provide an honest and straight answer.

One plausible reason for raising funds ahead of the legal maturity date might be to avoid the liquidity risk if there are no investors in Jun 2026 to refinance the maturing bonds.  Starting a year early gives Belong time to find punters, but paying £1.5m for avoiding refinancing risk is far too high a price to pay.

No point asking RCB for an answer as they don't provide contact details and in their bond prospectus they tell readers to speak to their financial adviser if they have any queries, i.e., "don't bother us with your queries".

The new bond also offers an additional £100,000 capital gain - probably as a sweetener to persuade existing bondholders to tender their 4.5% bonds and to buy the more expensive ones on offer, and to persuade new investors to subscribe.  Existing investors get favourable treatment when allocating who gets how much of the new bonds on offer as the amount to be raised is limited.

The new bonds are unsecured in terms of assets of Belong, i.e., no properties or guarantees.  The bonds are secured on the right of RCB under its loan to Belong.  In other words, bond holders rely on RCB for payment and RCB relies on Belong for payment.  RCB sits in the middle and takes a fee.  Various distributors share half of the 0.5% fee paid by Belong to RCB for distributing the bonds, i.e., for finding retail and institutional investors.  On £50m, that 0.5% equates to £250,000, or £50,000 per annum for a 5-year bond.

I wanted to know how much RCB was earning in their loan to Belong, i.e., was their interest rate higher than the 7.5%pa rate they paid on their bonds?  According to the Prospectus, the rates are identical, so no mark-up by RCB.