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Not sure I can even promise to watch Buyer Beware! again this evening at 8.30pm on RTE1. It won’t be creamy pints distracting me this week though. I’ll be attending some consumer affairs related meetings following on from the bombshell this morning that one third of the Consumer Association of Ireland directors Executive have resigned.

Check out the RTE1 website here to see what they might be covering this week. At the time of writing, it hasn’t yet been updated. The best I can find is from their programme guide:

Consumer affairs series. A company which claims to have the best interests of children at heart is found to be offering dangerous drugs advice.

They’re still not covering anything that’s appearing in the top in the top listing of consumer complaints to the NCA. Nor have they covered anything to do with the systematic theft of money from consumers by some of Irelands biggest companies.

Let us know back here if you have any feedback on this evenings show.

Last weekend, I delivered my letter of resignation from the Executive and Council of the Consumers Association of Ireland to the Chairman (James Doorley), Chief Executive (Dermott Jewell) and to my fellow Council members.

In my letter of resignation, I communicated my two key reasons for leaving which I will return to here in a future post.

Edit: Since I originally composed this post, two more directors have resigned from the Consumers Association of Ireland. That’s 20% of the Associations Council (or one third of the Executive) resigning before even the first Coucil meeting of the new term.

Regular readers are probably aware that I’m not a big fan of the actions of the National Consumer Agency. And though it might have been expected, you haven’t seem me dancing in the streets with the news that the NCA would be no more following the 2009 budget announcement that the NCA would be merged with the Competition Authority.

Apart from a comment about the proposal on my original budget post, I haven’t really approached this subject.

There’s not a whole lot for me to say really, having thought about it since the original announcement. I absolutely believe that we need an organisation such as the National Consumer Agency to protect the interests of Irish consumers, but not operated in the way this organisation is.

The NCA has at least 60 different pieces of consumer legislation at their disposal under which they can protect consumers, yet during 2007 when they received at least 2,250 complaints regarding suspected legislation breaches, there were only the following prosecutions:

• Failure to display price of grocery product - 3
• Failure to display prices in a public house - 3
• Failure to display price of petrol - 6
• Other fines imposed - 4
• Prohibition Orders - 3
• Oh, and don’t forget the classic “undertakings” - there was 1 of those.

That’s less than a 1% prosecution rate - hardly “putting the consumer first”.

And what does it take to achieve this 1% prosecution rate - according to the NCA 2007 Annual Report:

The Agency employed 59 staff, of which 55 were civil servants on secondment from the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment, 3 were on secondment from Forfás and 1 is a member of staff of the Agency.

And at a cost to the tax payer of:

State funding was provided through the Office of the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and amounted to €5,369,331 for the period ended 31December 2007.

We do need a National Consumer Agency - and possibly we need it to be independent and for it to not be merged with the Competition Authority - but for an organisation that claims to be “putting consumers first” it needs to do a whole lot more and to be a whole lot more effective before we can feel in any way protected.

You’ll be familiar with the recent Financial Regulator decision to fine Quinn Insurance €3.25m and Sean Quinn personally the amount of €200,000.

In a very unexpected move, Quinn Insurance and Sean Quinn himself meekly rolled over and accepted their punishment with the fines being accepted, and Quinn resigning from the board of his own company.

Which has me very confused since the most explicit information I can find regarding what the wrongdoing actually was doesn’t get any more detailed than:

The regulator said it had “reasonable cause to suspect that breaches of regulatory requirements occurred in relation to Quinn Insurance”.

Only reasonable cause? No proof? Quinn Insurance and Sean Quinn accept a fine of €3.45m on the basis of merely a suspicion?

Why?

Particularly given past activities and challenges made by Quinn Direct Insurance in the face of a decision of the Financial Services Obudsman in April 2005. In that case, the Ombudsman directed (wrongly as it turned out) Quinn Direct to refund to all impacted customers a €25 administration charge levied by the company though they hadn’t informed clients that they would be liable for such a charge if they transferred a policy from one car to another.

I don’t know if the financial impact of this decision would have been worth as much as €3.45m to Quinn Direct at the time, but their immediate reaction to that decision was to challenge the Financial Ombudsman and take them to the Commercial Court.

But not this time

I can only say that I’m puzzled as to why Quinn have accepted this recent Financial Regulator decision without a whimper. Accepting this punishment seems to have called off the hounds with respects to the Financial Regulator, but it seems that the Office of Director of Corporate Enforcement could still be involved.

Over on SayNoTo1890.com over the weekend I published an appeal for assistance with an idea that I had for the website. In short, I think a useful browser extension/plug-in could be built to manipulate our database of numbers for the benefit of users visiting website where 1890, 1850 and 0818 numbers are displayed.

Head over to here to read more, and contact me through the details provided there if you think it’s something that you can help out with.

During the late spring and summer of 2008 as petrol prices were rising drastically, we were told various different reasons behind those rises. It was because of the weakness of the dollar, the increase in demand and the approach of peak oil and the impact on supply. Or all of the above, or some of the above.

However, there were strong suspicions that a significant proportion of the rise was due to the market speculation on the part of investment banks, commodity traders and hedge funds. This article (albeit coming from a particular “angle”) cites that 60% of the rises we saw earlier in the year were due to speculation alone.

Not being a financier or an economist, I don’t know myself, and I haven’t seen any specific evidence for any of the arguments.

However, what is very noticeable is that since many of the worlds larger financial institutions have become strapped for cash because of the fallout from the “credit crunch” caused by their exposure to sub-prime mortgages, we’ve seen a significant decline in the price of oil.

In fact, we’ve actually seen a decline of about 60%. Spooky!

Do the oil speculators from late spring and summer now have no more spare cash to play with on the oil commodity markets, and thereby causing the price to drop?

Did they in fact try to manipulate/speculate on the oil commodity markets earlier in the year in an effort to actually bring in some extra cash quickly to cover the hole in their finances that they saw coming because of the sub-prime problems?

The temptation, and subsequent reality, of some creamy pints of Guinness on Thursday evening prevented me from watching the 2^nd episode of Buyer Beware on RTE1.

And unfortunately, this isn’t one of the programmes that RTE allows you catch up on by providing it online. However, based on the topic of bogus modelling agencies, the following Top Tips might be of use to those who may be targeted by such scams.

Did anyone see the programme? Any comments?

As a matter of interest, I was doing some recent research where I was reading through the 2007 Annual Report for the National Consumer Agency. Page 52 of the report shows the top 6 reasons for complaints and information requests to the NCA (78,000 in total during 2007). So far, none of the 4 items covered in Buyer Beware! appear in the top 6 problems for Irish consumers.

Just a few short points for the weekend.

• ECB Bonus Money - Following our comments last week regarding what you could do with your ECB interest rate windfall, the Irish Times Business blog proposes that you should really be thinking about putting the extra cash against your mortgage and thereby reducing the term. Given an Irish Independent story on Friday that says the cost of lending on credit cards on personal loans will be increasing as banks scramble to keep making money, we’d actually suggest that you reduce higher cost borrowings first (such as credit cards and loans) before paying off the cheaper borrowing that is your mortgage.

• Clocked Cars - Earlier this week, the Irish Independent provided some coverage on the AA research that found that upwards of 10000 imported 2nd hand cars may have been clocked before being sold to Irish customers. We’ve covered car clocking here a few times before, and have criticised the National Consumer Agency policy of not prosecuting those caught doing so. Check out our Top Tips on how to check if the car you’re thinking of buying may be clocked. This subsequent Independent article indicates though that like everything else in the world, clocking cars is becoming more technically advanced – but most of our Top Tips will still help you identify other tell-tale signs that a car might be clocked.

• A Short Rant - Why do so few people have the courtesy to respond to phone and e-mail queries these days. If I were to stand in front of you to ask you the same question, would you still ignore me? I’m talking about sales inquiries to businesses, queries to customer service departments, calls and e-mails to work colleagues, contacts and acquaintances, or just general responses to e-mails, phone calls or written communications. I may just work to a different standard, but as much as possible, I respond to anything I get within the day, and if I can’t I will still respond saying I can’t respond, and confirming when I will. Is that so hard? Am I asking too much?

• Price of Petrol - I noticed this morning that petrol in Tesco in Clearwater in Finglas was 105.6c per litre. Just think – if the government hadn’t added 8c per litre to the cost of petrol in the budget, we’d now be back down below the €1 per litre for the first time in a few of years – April or May 2005. The NCA are investigating petrol prices at the moment because we’re told that Irish petrol prices are 20% higher than the rest of Europe. The budget increase of 8c at the moment represents 8% of the price, or nearly half of the 20%. Will the government appointed National Consumer Agency rightly associate most of the price difference reason to government taxation, or will we get some other reasons? Or will they shy away from criticising their masters?

• And Finally - No Frills Shouldn’t mean no standards? An interesting article from the Cork Southern Star newspaper detailing a range of issues with Ryanair.
  

Have a great weekend!

There was an article in the Irish Independent this morning entitled “Check out the firm before you sign up“. In it, the website Solocheck.ie was touted as a place where you can go to check up on a company before accepting any employment offers.

According to the article:

For about €6, you can check the status of a firm on www.solocheck.ie. The site will give you access to the latest financial accounts of any company you are thinking of joining, if they are listed on the site.

Yes, all good - the experts will definitely tell you that you should know all you can about companies you’re looking to for a job.

But ValueIreland.com tells you that you should save money wherever possible. So, for €2.50 you can get exactly the same documents from the Company Registration Office for Irish registered companies.

Tonight, 8.30pm on RTE1, is the 2nd episode of the new series Buyer Beware!. Here’s what’s on tonights show:

Episode two talks to unsuspecting girls who paid up to €300 to a modelling agency which failed to deliver on promises made.

The programme also takes Boucher-Hayes from the east to the west coast of Ireland to hear from Irish businesses who gave monies to British company, Vardis, in the belief that their companies would receive publicity through wall-planner calendar ads, where proceeds from the cost of the ads would be sent to The Laura Crane Trust, a British-based cancer charity. Boucher-Hayes goes to the North of England to see if he can get some answers from those behind Vardis.

Hopefully I’ll get home in time to get to see it all this evening. Come back here aftewards to get my thoughts, maybe some useful tips in response to the issues raised, and leave your own thoughts as well.