Okay, thank you. I don't mind being under pressure.
I'm going to skim through my presentation because I want to get to the recommendations as well. I think it's important.
We're pretty new on the block. We actually originated from the First Nations Fiscal Management Act, so I think it's important for people to understand where we came from and a bit of our structure.
I'm going to call us the FNFA; that's what everybody does. If I say “First Nations Finance Authority”, I'll be taking up all the time. We're governed by our first nations members. It's the first cooperative borrowing authority in the world for first nations people. Nothing like this exists anywhere else. It means that first nations can access capital at rates available to other levels of government, and from the very same place as other levels of government get capital, the capital markets. So we have a direct access to the capital markets. This gives each chief and council the ability to focus on economic and capital planning with the confidence that we're there to raise the financing and the capital market.
So our mandate under the act—I'll call it the FMA—is to go out and get financing at the lowest possible rates for our members. There is a bit of process that our members have to go through to become a borrowing member. Membership is voluntary. They have to get permission from the Minister of AANDC to access the act and to work with us. Today there are 124 first nations that have requested to work under the act, so essentially, they want to work through the process to get access to the capital markets.
We have two other institutions that are also incorporated under the act. One is the First Nations Financial Management Board, the FMB. Their purpose is really to shore up the financial capacity of the first nations. So they develop the financial administration law that has standards recognized around the world. They also look at the financial performance of the first nations over the past five years. So once first nations are able to establish a financial administration law and pass certain economic tests, they can actually become a member with us. That's the only way they can borrow money through us. There's a tax commission, the First Nations Tax Commission, which was set up to create a regulatory framework to exercise real property taxation and to generate property tax revenues.
So the FMA, the act, has two arms to it. The first arm deals with property taxation and the second arm deals with other revenues, so it's really own-source revenues that the first nations have that they can use to establish a borrowing capacity. The borrowing capacity is based on their revenue streams and how much we can lever in the capital markets. So those leverage rates were done in collaboration with the capital markets. They are acceptable to the capital markets.
The other thing is that when first nations are able to come and borrow from us, they can choose the term of the loan. The loan and the accompanying rate can be fixed for up to 30 years. So it's really for long-term planning for capital projects.
Eligible projects that the first nations focus on under the act are infrastructure, community housing, equipment, equity participation in resource projects, as well as economic and social development. Today, we actually have $55 million in loans out, and this is through our interim financing program as a part of our long-term rate. We have actually issued $55 million to about 10 first nations in interim financing, at a rate of 2.6%. This is the interim rate that we're able to get. These interim loans will be rolled into long-term fixed rates this month.
This month we're actually making history. We're issuing our first debenture, for close to $100 million. We do that on the strength of credit ratings.
We've received two independent credit ratings, from Moody's and from DBRS, Dominion Bond Rating Service. They've given us two investment grade ratings, which means that we have a lot of investors who want to buy. As a matter of fact, our $100 million debenture is pretty well sold. It's pre-sold already. There's a German investor, an insurance company from Germany investing into this debenture. So there are really exciting things happening.
The debenture that we're going to be re-lending at the rates that we're going to be re-lending it, is going to be around 3.75% to 3.85% for a 10-year fixed loan. Those first nations that want a longer-term loan can refinance at that point in time.
I should say that we're working on a second debenture, which will be issued probably by March of next year, and we have about $65 million towards that second debenture already. So we want to issue in about $100-million increments—