Sixty-six corporate tax regimes throughout the EU, out of 250 studied, have been adjudged harmful by a long-awaited high-level report and should be phased out by 2003.

Some six Irish schemes are listed but the Government is understood to be unconcerned as the report specifically acknowledges that five are already in transition under the terms of the agreement with the Commission for phasing to a standard rate of corporation tax by 2005.

Officials finalised the Primarola report on the implementation of the code of conduct on harmful corporate tax competition last Friday but it has yet to be published.

It goes to the EU council of finance ministers on November 29th.

The code requires member-states to desist from giving sectoral or geographic tax breaks to businesses by requiring them to apply a common corporation tax regime.

Ireland's manufacturing export regime, the IFSC regime, Shannon, the special petroleum tax, a regime for abating tax to aid research and development and one to aid repatriation of foreign earnings, are the six Irish schemes mentioned.

Only the last has not been amended, however. It allows a reduction of the tax liability for firms which repatriate profits from subsidiaries abroad to create jobs in Ireland.

The report cites nine regimes in Holland, five in Luxembourg, four in Belgium and France, three in Spain, two in Austria, and one each in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy and Portugal.

Although the UK gets off scot-free, Gibraltar is mentioned three times and about 20 off-shore regimes in either the Dutch Antilles, the Channel Islands, or the Virgin Islands are fingered.

Whether the report and its recommendations will be adopted and implemented, however, is still open to question due to the deadlock over another key part of the tax package which is supposed to go to the Helsinki summit next month.

At least four states, including Ireland, are understood to be insisting that it must be the whole package or nothing.