AIB chief executive Mr Michael Buckley and his senior management team might appear a little red-faced when they meet with the investment institutions they have summoned to London's Great Eastern Hotel today to explain their plan for "driving for growth".

The Irish bankers will have carefully prepared a presentation to reassure some of their most important shareholders that they have a winning formula that will ensure that AIB can continue to extract large profits from its banking operations at home and abroad.

They will be hoping to treat as an embarrassing aside the fact that the bank has owned up to wrongly pocketing an estimated €14 million since 1996 from Irish customers who were overcharged when using the bank's foreign exchange facilities.

In reality though, this scandal may prove much more damaging for the bank and will undermine the confidence of its 1.1 million retail customers in Ireland, the source of so much of AIB's profits.

It would be fair to say that Mr Buckley and his lieutenants are amongst the most experienced bankers in the world when it comes to dealing with embarrassing crises.

In terms of a scandal, a €14 million rip-off pales into insignificance when you compare it to the $691 million AIB admitted to losing just over two years ago when its former star trader, Mr John Rusnak, ran amok in Baltimore, Maryland.

In February 2002 Mr Buckley had to try to convince the bank's international shareholders that it could withstand Mr Rusnak's losses, unlike Barings Bank, which had collapsed when its rogue trader, Mr Nick Leeson, lost $1.4 billion in 1995.

And to a large extent its damage limitation initiatives were successful.

Much of the blame was focused in Baltimore, where Rusnak and his immediate superiors were dismissed. No-one in Ireland took the blame for what had unfolded.

Mr Buckley and the bank's chairman at the time, Mr Lochlann Quinn, both tendered their resignations to the board but they weren't accepted.

"I tendered it on the belief that, when you look at accountability, that you can't stop at any particular level in a company. The buck, as far as I was concerned, stopped with me," Mr Buckley said at the time.

"It took a bit of persuading" by the board to convince him to stay, he added.

At the height of this scandal, the bank was at pains to distance its senior management in Dublin from what had been known on the ground in Baltimore.

Mr Buckley eventually admitted that he had been told about a market rumour of excessive trading in Allfirst in 2001 but had done no more than ask for and accept an explanation from Mr Rusnak's boss, Mr David Cronin, that there was no reason for concern.

Yesterday, AIB disclosed that in 2002, while the bank was dealing with the Rusnak scandal, someone below senior management level had stumbled upon another potentially embarrassing crisis.

That person discovered that the bank had been levying a 1 per cent charge on non-cash foreign exchange transactions since 1996 when it should have been charging only 0.5 per cent.

The Republic's biggest retail bank would have us believe that this astute individual didn't fully grasp the severity of this problem and it never made the agenda for any senior management meetings.

Judging by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority's(IFSRA's) statement on the affair yesterday, it seems clear it was the regulator's intervention that put the problem on Mr Buckley's table, after an anonymous tip-off. AIB has once again gone into crisis management mode. A high level investigation will ensue and the bank has said it will do everything it can to track down the affected customers to make amends.

IFSRA will make sure that it does.

In the meantime Mr Buckley and his team will be hoping to quickly deal with the problem and to convince investors that it is just a minor distraction.

It is anything but.

News that Ireland's biggest bank was charging twice the margin on certain foreign exchange transactions over almost eight years will do nothing to endear the bank to any of the bank's customers.

Those interested will be able to hear a recorded webcast of today's investor relations presentation tomorrow on the AIB group website.