direct sales to portugal

I’ve looked everywhere for a clear answer and can’t find out.

we have a client who is UK based VAT registered and sells to the EU. The client is registered within various EU states for sales tax but not Portugal. The client usually ships in to the UK from China, pays import duties and taxes, and recovers input in the normal way.

The client’s Portuguese customer has asked if the client can ship directly to Portugal from China. Now in this situation I would have thought that sales tax and duty would be paid upon entry, and as the client is not registered within Portugal this would be an extra cost to my client and therefore their customer.

Can the end customer reclaim the input VAT even though our client is not registered in Portugal? If not, the only way to achieve this would be to ship to the UK as normal and then distribute to Portugal and treat as an intra EU sale.