Although he spent about a third of his long life in exile, the oil baron Iosif Dragan was a devoted and passionate Romanian nationalist.

Iosif Constantin Dragan was born in Lugoj on the River Timis in south-western Romania in 1917. He graduated in law from the University of Bucharest in 1938. In 1940 he won a scholarship to study economics and political science at Rome University; he went on to complete a doctorate in law there. Dragan found the political atmosphere of Fascist Italy congenial.

His nationalist sentiments had attracted him to the Iron Guard, Romania’s own fascist movement, and in Italy he published a number of newspaper articles on the Romanian version of fascism. This was to experience a brief period in power in 1940-41 but an army officer, General, later Marshal, Antonescu, suppressed it; so chaotic had the rule of the Guard become that even Nazi Germany, anxious for stability in a country which supplied much of its oil, backed the coup.

Oil was central to the economy and politics of Romania, and it was to become equally important in the life of Dragan. In 1941 he established a company which exported the precious commodity from Romania to Mussolini’s Italy. The company prospered, as did its founder. By the end of the war in Europe the communists were the dominant element in Romania, and Dragan, because of his support for the Iron Guard and his close association with the Mussolini regime, was not allowed to return to his native land. He remained for some years in Italy where he continued to prosper. His new fortune was based on Butan Gas, an Italian-based company which was soon active in most European and many African states. The multinational Butan Gas was one of a number of companies in which Dragan played a prominent role. By his death his personal wealth was estimated at $1.6 billion (£870 million), and he was said to be the richest Romanian.

Dragan had never given up his devotion to what he considered to be Romanian values, but he also espoused the pan-European cause. In 1967 he established the European Foundation Dragan. It now has offices in Rome, Milan, Palma, Bucharest and Dragan’s native, Lugoj. The idea of a European federation was also promoted by the journal The European Bulletin, founded by Dragan in 1950.

But it was Romania which remained his main interest, and in other publications financed by Dragan, that country’s past was idolised and idealised. Dragan’s views were, in fact, much the same as those of Nicolae Ceausescu who came to power in Romania in 1965. Collaboration between the new communist dictator and the former fascist flourished. One result of this was a four-volume biography of Antonescu, published between 1986 and 1991 by the European Foundation. It was based on previously unseen documents provided to Dragan’s research team by the Ceausescu regime and it painted Antonescu in a more favourable light than any biography published since the war. In addition to his work on Antonescu, Dragan was credited with the authorship of a number of works of history and of autobiography, as well as economics.

After the fall of communism in 1989 Dragan was able to return to Romania. He was soon associated with figures such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor on the right of Romanian politics, and although in 2008 Tudor denied that he had received any funding from Dragan the two had been instrumental in the setting up in 1990 of the League of Marshal Ion Antonescu, a title which resonated with the Iron Guard’s official title, the League of the Archangel Michael. After 1989 Dragan also set up a new publishing house, Europa Nova, in Romania, as well as a radio and a television station, and a weekly and a daily newspaper. He also founded a new university, the European University Dragan, in Lugoj, and financed the gigantic rock carving of Decabalus on the banks of the Danube near Orsova. This was an act of grandiloquent nationalism: Decabalus was the Roman who conquered what is now Romania and it was, says the Romanian nationalist school of history, from the Romans that the modern Romanian nation is descended.

Dragan played his public life with panache and painted on a grand scale. His private life is generally obscure but even here flamboyance is not entirely absent. In 1995, at the age of 78, he was married to Daniela Veronica Gusa, aged 22. She was the daughter of Stefan Gusa, who had been deputy Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff in 1989 and who had played a leading role in attempting to suppress the revolt in Timisoara in December of that year. It was not his first marriage because Mike Fink, born in 1971 as the son of a previous union, claimed in 2005 that he had not been able to contact his father for three years. One Romanian news organisation claimed that Dragan was being held captive by his young wife’s family and his business associates, a story which collapsed when Dragan and his wife were seen dining in a Bucharest restaurant a few days later.

Dragan is survived by his wife, Daniela, their three sons and by Mike Fink.

Iosif Dragan, oil mogul, was born on June 20, 1917. He died on August 21, 2008, aged 91