The Monetary Board, the Central Bank and the Superintendence of Banks were aware of Baninter’s real numbers of the assets and liabilities, and also approved the Banco de Progreso’s financial statements. This contradicts earlier statements claiming that these entities “discovered” a “parallel bank” only when they finally had to take over the ailing institutions. The Listin Diario says that the annex to the agreement reached by the two banks to combine their operations, in an attempt to save Baninter, shows that the authorities accepted Baninter’s report of RD$80.70 billion in assets and liabilities of RD$77.17 billion. They also accepted the financial statements from Baninter & Trust and Intercontinental de Seguros (Intercontinental Insurance). On 24 March of 2003 the Monetary Board approved the contract fusing the two banks. The IMF report, prepared by a panel of international banking and financial experts, says that “it is not believable that having been developed, presumably, over many years, an irregularity of the magnitude of this double bookkeeping (parallel accounting), with the amount and number of operations involved, was not noticed by the supervisory bodies.” The very same Monetary Board, most pointedly, in its Resolution of 24 March 2003, approved the fusion of the two banks.