OFF THE TICKER : Dressed for Dinner, He Wants Dough

As Spain teeters on recession, a company called the Debt Collector in the Dinner Jacket never had it so good.

“We’re a crisis industry,” said Assistant Director General Manuel Naharro. “We’re like undertakers. We don’t want anyone to die, but we don’t want to be out of work either.”

The 5-year-old company, called El Cobrador del Frac in Spanish, is now Europe’s biggest debt collection agency.

Its trademark is Pedro Zugasti, the debt collector in person, who goes about Madrid in a frock coat, black topper and bow tie, looking like a character from a Charles Dickens novel.

The resemblance stops there. Zugasti also sports gangster-style dark glasses.

“We started at a good time, a time of economic explosion, years with plenty of money and lots of consumerism. . . . It was a dazzling success,” Naharro said.

“Now we’re in bad years, things will only get better.”

The company’s tactic is simple. If its team of private detectives and lawyers cannot persuade the con man to cough up, it sends Zugasti to shame him into doing so.

He hands over a card bearing the words: “Please contact us.”

The company says it has a two-thirds success rate--Zugasti only has to be brought in for 5% of the cases--and profits are 50% better this year than its first year.