One of the great urban myths from the days shortly after we arrived … was the “abandoned luxury car at the Dubai airport.”

The narrative was this: High-flying foreign investor, realizes things have gone south as the real estate market implodes, well aware that white-collar crime is often heavily punished here … goes to the airport, parks his expensive car and bolts, escaping crushing debt.

Actually, it wasn’t a myth. It happened. But not to the degree that it was talked about a few years ago. And not to the point where every story done by visiting journalists, for about three years, about Dubai’s economic contraction should have started with an anecdote about Ferraris abandoned at DBX.

And now we have an update on the topic.

Angela Shah, an American, a University of Texas alumnus and former co-worker of ours at The National, has revisited the topic on her blog.

Angela suggests that the phenomenon was overstated in 2009 and 2010, when Dubai was in sufficient trouble that Abu Dhabi loaned/gave the glitzy emirate $20 billion. You know, to tide them over.

She suggests that we now have over-corrected, and that those stories we want to relegate to history … still play out now and then.

And she has photos of the abandoned Nissan Murano to prove it.

I also have discovered an abandoned car, a Mercedes, and right here in Abu Dhabi. It is parked just outside the police  headquarters. It isn’t a new Mercedes, though, and it isn’t an upper-end one; it has no name on it at all. No combination of letters and numbers. Perhaps they were pried off by somebody.

The tires are going flat, and someone recently bashed in one of the headlights, and the dust on the car is thick and deep.

Whenever I walk past this car, I think about the Dubai stories and whether the Mercedes belonged to some who got out just ahead of the law.