Pezeshkian accepts Paknejad's resignation and names Bovard acting oil minister

President Masoud Pezeshkian has accepted the resignation of oil minister Mohsen Paknejad and appointed Hamid Bovard, chief executive of the National Iranian Oil Company, as acting minister. The presidential office issued the decree under Article 135 of the constitution, which lets the president name a caretaker when a minister leaves. State media carried the text on Monday, 5 October 2026.

Paknejad had held the job since 21 August 2024, when parliament confirmed him with 222 votes. The National said he had submitted the resignation some time earlier for personal reasons and had insisted on leaving. Mehr News Agency, citing Seyyed Mehdi Tabatabaei, the deputy for communications in the president's office, said Pezeshkian accepted the resignation on Sunday night. No public reason beyond the personal one has been given by the presidency.

Bovard was born in 1343 in the Iranian calendar, which places his birth in 1964 or 1965. He has run Maroun Oil and Gas Production Company, the National Iranian South Oil Company, Iranian Oil Exploration Operations Company and the Iranian Offshore Oil Company. In September 2024 Paknejad named him deputy oil minister and chief executive of NIOC. He is 62. The decree tells him to work inside the constitution, the Vision Document, policies approved by the supreme leader, and the Seventh Development Plan, and to sit with the cabinet.

At a meeting of the oil ministry's council of deputies on Monday, Bovard thanked Paknejad for two years of work and said production and development programmes would continue. He also spoke of a plan to rebuild facilities damaged in what Iranian officials call the third imposed war, and of keeping petrochemical exports moving so the state can still collect foreign currency. He mentioned a target of cutting gas consumption by 10 percent and asked the public to use less energy.

The job he inherits is not a normal caretaker brief. The National reported that a US naval blockade has pushed Iran's crude exports to zero, a figure the country's central bank chief had already used. Fuel shortages have run alongside that loss of export volume. Paknejad had said, before leaving, that money from oil already sold was still reaching Iran. That is a narrower claim than a functioning export trade. It covers cargoes that left earlier, not ships that cannot clear the Gulf now.

Article 135 appointments are temporary by design. Parliament still has to confirm a permanent minister. Until that vote, Bovard holds both the company that produces most of Iran's crude and the ministry that sets policy for it. In a blockade, those two roles overlap. The company decides which fields keep pumping. The ministry decides what can be said about volumes, and which buyers are still being approached.

The timing sits next to a separate argument in Tehran about the Strait of Hormuz. Parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf has said the strait stays shut until Washington meets seven conditions from the June Islamabad memorandum. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has offered a seven-day sequence if the United States accepts Tehran's plan. Bovard did not tie his first public remarks to that sequence. He spoke about damaged plant, petrochemical sales and gas use. The omission matters. An acting oil minister who talks about rebuilding and not about the strait is signalling that field operations, not the diplomatic clock, are his first file.

Domestic fuel is the other pressure. ATF and gasoline shortages have already shown up in neighbouring markets through higher prices. Inside Iran they show up as queues and rationing. A 10 percent cut in gas use, if Bovard means it as a target rather than a slogan, would fall on households and industry at the same time as export revenue is missing. The Seventh Development Plan assumes oil income. A caretaker who cannot move crude has little room to fund the rebuild he described on Monday.

Bovard's record is operational, not political. South Oil Company and the offshore company are the units that actually lift Iranian crude. That background fits a period in which the problem is physical: ships, insurance, damaged plant, and a navy on the other side of the traffic lane. It fits less well if the next fight is in parliament over who should hold the portfolio for the rest of Pezeshkian's term.

The open question is how long the caretaker period lasts. Article 135 does not set a long fuse. If parliament is asked to confirm Bovard, the vote will be read as a verdict on the blockade as much as on the man. If Pezeshkian sends another name, the oil file will have had three ministers or caretakers in two years, with exports already at the floor the central bank described.