In addition to five 'non-co-operative jurisdictions' that were already listed on the European Union's tax blacklist – namely American Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, the US Virgin Islands, Guam and Samoa – the revised list now includes yet another ten: Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Dominica, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Vanuatu.

This is the first comprehensive revision of the list, which originally came out in late 2017.

The EU, threatening dire consequences, induced the now-blacklisted jurisdictions to promise it some time ago that they would change their tax regimes in its favour. According to Europa, its press service, they did not pass the necessary reforms by the end of last year, when the agreed deadline fell. The tax blacklist is not to be confused with the money-laundering blacklist which the EU revised last month.

The EU has also extended its deadlines for eleven jurisdictions that had 'reasonable excuses' not to reform their laws on time. The classic example of this, according to an EU spokeswoman, is Switzerland which can only implement the desired changes by changing its constitution with a referendum that cannot take place until June. The other ten reprieved jurisdictions are Anguilla, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Curaçao, the Maldives, Morocco and Palau. The spokeswoman added that the EU had found 32 other countries to be ‘compliant.’

The consequences for countries that do not bow to the EU's demands for changes to their tax systems – and it is obvious that these are only the first demands of many – might eventually be severe. In March last year the EU took its first step towards stopping the transit of all EU funds through jurisdictions whose tax systems it does not like. It issued guidelines to stop "EU external development and investment funds" from going through entities in those countries. It aimed these guidelines at "the use of EU funds by International Financial Institutions such as the European Investment Bank, development financial institutions – including the European Fund for Sustainable Development – and other eligible counterparties."

The guidelines call for a series of checks that should "pinpoint a risk of tax avoidance with a business entity" in a blacklisted jurisdiction. For example, before channelling funding through an entity, every EU firm should make sure that there are sound business reasons for the way in which the project in question is structured that do not take advantage of the technicalities of a tax system or of mismatches between two or more tax systems for the purpose of reducing a tax bill.

In March the EU said that its subject countries had agreed on a set of measures that they can choose to apply against the listed countries. These included a heavier layer of monitoring and audits, the use of withholding taxes, special requirements for documents and "anti-abuse provisions" of the kind pioneered by the UK a few years earlier. It resolved to help its member-states to do more in this area with the passage of time.

Most promises that these hapless jurisdictions made were connected to a deadline at the end of last year. The EU's oddly-named "code of conduct group on business taxation" kept an eye on their legal reforms until the beginning of this year. The final approval for the present list came from a council on which a representative of every EU country sits. This council says that it is looking forward to "the evolution of the listing criteria that the EU uses to establish the list," a sure sign of more stringent and aggressive tax-related demands to come.