Word: del
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Goldwork, of course, is Colombia's real forte, and this is dramatically on display in the heart of Bogotá's downtown at the Museo del Oro, tel: (57-1) 343 2221. It reopened last fall following a 10-year renovation. Drenched in sunlight and sprawling over a quartet of gallery-filled floors, the Museo includes 6,500 gold and ceramic pieces - many more than 2,000 years old. (See more about Colombia...
...headquartered in Detroit and employs more than 53,000 people in Michigan, but in the corporate-bankruptcy system, courts compete for cases - especially big ones - so the company could easily wind up at a courthouse hundreds of miles away. Likely venues include Wilmington, Del., the state in which GM is incorporated, and New York City, which has a history of landing large out-of-town cases, such as those involving WorldCom and Enron. (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
...That discomfort is exactly what the agencies count on. The idea of using costumed collectors dates back to the 1980s, when a company, the Cobrador del Frac (or Tuxedo Collector), began sending out agents dressed in black ties and driving cars emblazoned with the company logo. Others followed suit, in ever more extravagant getups, all of them banking on the debtor's sense of shame to motivate repayment. "Personal honor, your public image, is still very important in Spain," says José Romero of the Zorro Collectors. "If one of our agents shows up at an apartment, everyone...
...collectors don't say a word to their targets but instead simply follow them down the street or sit at a neighboring table in a restaurant. "We don't think of it as humiliation so much as making something public," says Miguel González of the Cobradores del Monasterio, whose agents wear monks' habits. "It's the same as with pedophiles whose names are published so that others will know...
...Apparently the tactics work. The Cobrador del Frac now has 400 employees across Spain. Its commercial director, Juan Carlos Granda, says it has a 63% success rate. And with the percentage of people who default on loans skyrocketing in Spain - it reached 3.8% in January, compared with 0.95% the year before - the number of creditors who look to its services is growing. "Thanks to the [financial] crisis, we've seen about a 20% increase in business in the past year," Granda says...