It started last week as an ordinary session in the Majlis, Iran’s parliament. But then, in the course of a speech, Mohammad Reza Pour-Ebrahimi, chairman of the parliament’s Economic Affairs Committee, made an astounding statement. Between Jan. 21 and March 20, he said “A sum of $30 billion was taken out of Iran.” The capital flight came against the backdrop of sporadic but widespread protests that began the month before and continue to the present day, with a nationwide truck driver strike.

While Pour-Ebrahimi’s statement might sound like hyperbole to outsiders, his peers are not treating it as such. The chief of Iran’s chamber of commerce suggested that the $30 billion that left Iran was spent by Iranian tourists abroad, but according to Iran’s central statistics bureau, that two-month figure is far higher than what Iranians send or spend abroad on an annual basis. Government spokesman Mohammad Bager Nobakht, meanwhile, suggested that the $30 billion sum represented real estate investment abroad. If that were true, then Iranian officials are either trying to evade sanctions through front companies or are possibly stashing money abroad so that it is accessible to them if the regime falters.