Tau-31, Holman Outpost and IMG

[Alex.]

as far as we know we never encountered IMG Guard before. A new faction? Must be.

Not exactly, a few years ago almost every faction had a linked Guard faction, with the main purpose of controlling access to a restricted 'Guard' system. That purpose is largely gone now. This is essentially a reuse of the old guard faction, I suppose because it's linked to the actual IMG, allows IMG to dock in all cases, and can have different rep to normal IMG (which can be used to exclude people neutral to IMG that Gallia doesn't like). I'm not saying I agree/disagree with the exact implementation here as that's a tricky question given my combination of IMG membership and new dev status (though my dev work is nothing to do with this)