Blacklist of world's 30 worst-offending tax havens published … Hong Kong features but Luxembourg is nowhere to be seen

A blacklist of the world's 30 worst-offending tax havens, published by the European commission, includes Hong Kong and the tiny Polynesian island of Niue, where 1,400 people live in semi-subsistence - but does not include Luxembourg, the EU's wealthy tax avoidance hub. 

Niue, situated east of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean, has appeared on tax haven lists before. But the island, which has an economic output estimated at just US$10 million a year, has rarely been cast as a threat to the tax receipts of Europe's largest economies.

The list also includes various well-known havens - among them the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands and Guernsey - but other jurisdictions that are commonly labelled as offshore tax avoidance hubs were notably missing. Jersey and Switzerland, for example, were not named.

Within Europe, Monaco, Lichtenstein and Andorra made it onto the blacklist. The commission explained, however, that the list of 30 "non-cooperative jurisdictions" was designed only to assess non-EU members. As a result, the new register does not include countries such as the Netherlands, Ireland, or Luxembourg - all of which are under investigation by the European competition authorities, suspected of offering "sweetheart" tax deals to multinationals.

The industrial scale on which Luxembourg - one of the richest per capita countries in the world - was facilitating the tax avoidance ploys of large corporations was laid bare last year in the LuxLeaks scandal.

Many years earlier, Luxembourg's aggressive tax policy had been shaped by the Jean-Claude Juncker. Juncker is now president of the European commission, having served as prime minister of the Grand Duchy for 18 years.

In March, the commission responded to the LuxLeaks scandal by insisting EU tax authorities share with one another the tax rulings they privately grant to multinationals.