Andrea Orcel, the £30m-a-year head of investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is set to play a reduced role in the running of the business in the wake of the retirement of Matthew Greenburgh, head of the firm's financial institutions group and the man dubbed Sir Fred Goodwin's banker.

Matthew Greenburgh, the man dubbed Fred Goodwin’s banker after advising on a string of deals for the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive, has today quit Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Q.We corresponded in 2008 regarding excessive bank charges, which you featured under the heading "I was broke but my bank still charged me". Guess what, I'm broke again! I have lost income during the recession, this has led to me being ill and I owe university fees. When you took up my complaint, the legal action on excessive fees had just begun. I was suffering financial hardship at the time of the charges, but this had eased by the time I made my claim, so the bank rejected my claim for a refund. Following the Supreme Court decision finding in favour of the banks, are there grounds for a refund of charges if a person again suffers financial hardship? RH, Hove.

Outlook You have to hand it to Nicolas Sarkozy. While most of Europe has been pussy-footing around last week's appointment of Michel Barnier, a Frenchman, as EU commissioner with jurisdiction over the City of London, France's President did not try to hide his delight. "I want the world to see the victory of the European model," Mr Sarkozy said yesterday. "[It] has nothing to do with the excesses of financial capitalism."

RBS gets another gift from ABN Amro

Royal Bank of Scotland has one more reason to regret its disastrous takeover of ABN Amro, a deal that lead to the departure of the boss, Sir Fred Goodwin. Guess where most of RBS's exposure to Dubai comes from? You got it: its Dutch subsidiary has always been a big player in the Middle East.

Many people have their own names for bonus-grabbing bankers – mostly unprintable – but Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland (84 per cent owned by the taxpayer) uses a different term. He and his colleagues are now "stewards of public money", he explains. We know that, Stephen – it's the fact that you keep stewarding it into executives' pockets that worries us.