Banco Intercontinental (or BANINTER) was the second largest privately held commercial bank in the Dominican Republic before collapsing in 2003 in a fraud tied to political corruption.

[1] In 2003, TV commentator Rafael Acevedo, president of the opinion polling firm Gallup Dominicana, had said that in the BANINTER scandal "there has been much complicity at every level of society: the government, the media, the church, the military.".

[2] In November 2005, Alvarez Renta was found liable by a federal jury in Miami of civil racketeering and illegal money transfers in a conspiracy to loot BANINTER during its final months of existence.

Báez Figueroa's main attorney is Marino Vinicio Castillo, who at the present time holds the position of President Fernandez's Drugs Consultant.

With 350 prosecutions and defense witnesses slated to testify, ex- president Hipólito Mejía among them, the criminal proceedings against Báez Figueroa began on April 2, 2006.

[3] It was prompted, as detailed at length in the trial by a scandal involving debt writeoffs and sweetheart loans or other financial deals suspected of having favored leading politicians and others.

How Báez Figueroa and his cronies were accused and some convicted of pulling it off provided a glimpse into the gift-giving and favor-swapping common between private business and top government officials in the Dominican Republic.

Noted journalist Miguel Guerrero wrote in his column of the daily El Caribe that the defrauders of BANINTER have been protected "by a dark combination of political, economic, mediatic and ecclesiastical powers" and that the sentence was a mamotreto".