RIO DE JANEIRO — The top executive of Petrobras, Brazil’s state oil company, resigned Friday, fueling uncertainty about the future of the country’s energy sector, a pillar of Brazil’s economy that has drawn enormous interest from foreign investors in recent years.
The executive, Pedro Parente, the company’s chief executive, had been credited with steadying Petrobras, which was devastated by a corruption scandal in 2014, and restoring foreign investors’ confidence as Brazil emerged from a crippling recession.
But Parente faced a barrage of political pressure and criticism in recent days as a loosely organized truckers’ strike paralyzed the country for more than a week, leading the government of President Michel Temer to subsidize the cost of gasoline and diesel at the pump.
Critics said the government’s move represented a return to the type of heavy-handed state meddling in oil prices that Parente had advised against when he took the helm of the company two years ago.
Petrobras’ fuel price policies have enormous impact in Brazil, a country of about 208 million people, because the company has a near monopoly on the refinery system. As the price of oil rose in recent months, and Brazil’s currency dropped in value against the dollar, consumers began paying considerably more at the pump.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum have been critical of Parente’s market-tethered fuel price policies ahead of October’s national elections.
The Senate president, Eunício Oliveira, seemed to celebrate Parente’s departure. “The president of a monopolist company such as Petrobras should have corporate vision, social sensitivity and political responsibility,” Oliveira wrote on Twitter.
The company named Ivan Monteiro, its current finance director, as its interim chief executive Friday night.
Five days before the strike began, Petrobras hit an eight-year record market valuation of 388.8 billion Brazilian reais ($103.7 billion). But since the beginning of the strike, it has lost over a third of its value.
The company controls 90 percent of the oil and gas sector in Brazil, which in the past decade has represented roughly 2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Parente’s departure caused the company’s stock price to plunge and is certain to chill investor interest in Brazil’s oil sector, compounding broader uncertainty about the country’s political future ahead of the presidential election, which is shaping up to be the most splintered and unpredictable in generations.
In his resignation letter, Parente said he had concluded, in the aftermath of the strike, that he could no longer “contribute to the development of the options the government has before it.”
Roberto Castello Branco, an economist at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, who served on the board of Petrobras from 2015 to 2016, said Parente took the helm of the company after demanding to have greater autonomy over keeping oil prices largely insulated from market fluctuations.
“Clearly that freedom ended,” he said. “I think the signals the government has sent through these decisions are negative. They have created a new cloud of uncertainty about the future of Brazil’s oil industry.”
The truckers’ strike and Parente’s resignation underscored the political weakness of Temer, who over the past few days has made progressively larger concessions as the strike over oil prices transformed into a broader outcry over corruption and a lack of faith in the political elite.
Parente’s resignation came two days after Sen. Vanessa Grazziotin proposed an inquiry into the company’s fuel price policies. Grazziotin said international oil companies stood to benefit from the subsidies Temer authorized in recent days, which will divert funds that had been earmarked for health and education programs.
“We’re living a moment of what I would almost call social convulsion,” Grazziotin said in an interview. “The government says the only way of reducing the price of fuel is by making the population pick up the tab.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.