Siobhan is almost certainly right to be worried that she wasn't charged the correct interest rate by AIB. Last week the Central Bank published the results of an inspection carried out on promotional interest rates on home loans and deposit accounts with six, unnamed, banks.

While the Central Bank found some evidence of the misleading advertising of promotional rates paid on some deposit accounts, far more serious problems were found to exist with home loans. Here the Central Bank seems to have found evidence of widespread overcharging, including not charging the promotional interest rate for the full 365-day period.

The Central Bank also found evidence of overcharging of customers with fixed-rate home loans although these did not form part of its investigation.

According to the Central Bank, an investigation into the overcharging is continuing at one bank while another bank is in the process of refunding its customers.

And who might these banks be? Unfortunately the Central Bank isn't saying. However, as soon as the results of the Central Bank investigation were published, Bank of Ireland immediately issued a statement saying that it was not one of the banks mentioned in the Central Bank media release, while AIB has said that all affected customers will be refunded with interest and Permanent TSB declined to comment.

As the Americans say, go figure.

Siobhan should contact AIB to find out if she is one of the home loan customers who was overcharged. If she isn't satisfied with its response she should then take her complaint to the Financial Ombudsman.

At the end of last week the Vodafone share price closed at 174p. When the special dividend of 15p per share which Vodafone paid in 2006 following the sale of a controlling interest in its Japanese business is added, Irish Vodafone shareholders -- most of whom received their shares when Eircom sold its Eircell mobile subsidiary to Vodafone in 2000 -- are back to within 45p of the 234p price at which Vodafone shares were trading when the Eircell deal was first announced in December of that year.

In other words, Vodafone shares have lost almost 20pc of their value over the past decade. It's not as bad as bank shares, and Vodafone still pays a dividend, but it marks the shares as having been a lousy investment.

So should Dessie write off Vodafone as a bad investment and sell his shares? That depends on what happens in the US where Vodafone has a 45pc stake in Verizon Wireless, the largest US mobile phone provider.

daggers

Up to now Vodafone has been at daggers drawn with Verizon, which owns the other 55pc, with the company paying no dividends to its shareholders.

That has now changed with Verizon Wireless due to resume paying dividends later this year. This should deliver a significant boost to the Vodafone share price, at which point Dessie might consider selling.

If he does decide to sell, Dessie will have to use the services of a stockbroker. He should check first if the stockbroker offers an "execution only" service, as this is by far the cheapest way of selling shares.