Conselho de Ministros Flips Fuel VAT Liability From Wholesalers Onto Buyers Under a Reverse-Charge Amendment to the Código do IVA — Border-Fraud Trail With Spain Drives the 11 June Decree

The Conselho de Ministros (Council of Ministers) approved on Thursday, 11 June, an amendment to the Código do Imposto sobre o Valor Acrescentado (VAT Code, Código do IVA) that switches the value-added-tax declaration obligation on a slice of the fuel chain from supplier onto buyer — a reverse-charge mechanism the government has aimed squarely at a cross-border fraud trail that has been moving fuel out of Spain into Portuguese petrol-station shadow networks at uncompetitive list prices.

The technical change is narrow but consequential. Under the current code, the wholesaler importing fuel is the entity that books the output VAT due on the onward sale. The new rule moves that liability point onto the buyer — typically a distributor or a forecourt operator — and shortens the window the fraud relies on. The Ministério das Finanças (Ministry of Finance) under Joaquim Miranda Sarmento framed the fraud as a phenomenon with “significant financial expression” in the fuels sector, language that signals a quantified loss the Autoridade Tributária (Tax Authority, AT) is treating as systemic rather than episodic.

The fraud pattern itself is a textbook missing-trader chain. Operators on the Spanish side of the border tightened their VAT-settlement rules in the last twelve months, pushing the schemes toward the easier-to-game Portuguese regime. The trick exploits the lag between the moment the AT registers a fuel sale and the moment VAT actually falls due — a window of up to three months in which the importing entity can dissolve, change name, or move its address before settling the bill. The fuel that has already been sold cheap on the Portuguese forecourt is by then untraceable to a viable VAT payer. Reverse-charge collapses that window because the obligation crystallises in the buyer’s books, and the buyer is the entity actually selling at the pump.

The mechanism is borrowed: Spain ran reverse-charge on fuel for years before its 2024 calibration tightened the supplier-side rules that drove the schemes north. Italy and Germany use comparable structures on industrial gas-oil. The Portuguese version, drafted by the AT and signed off by Conselho de Ministros, is expected to land in the parliament for cross-check in the next sitting block, with the technical regulation following via a despacho normativo from the Ministério das Finanças.

Two political reads sit on top of the technical move. The first is fiscal: the AT will not put a public number on the recovered base, but Brussels-side estimates of cross-border VAT-fraud schemes in fuel typically run in the low hundreds of millions per year for a member state of Portugal’s size. The second is operational: the reverse-charge model only catches what the buyer actually books. If the buyer is the schmoozing forecourt at the end of the chain, the AT now needs deeper inspections at the pump, not at the customs gate. The government is implicitly signalling a reorientation of AT field resource — fewer port-of-entry audits, more downstream forecourt sweeps.

The decree lands at a moment when the same Conselho de Ministros has held the desconto do Imposto sobre Produtos Petrolíferos (Petroleum Products Tax, ISP) in place at the pump and approved roughly €150 million per month in sector-wide energy supports. The optics are coherent: the government is keeping the consumer-facing price relief running while tightening the fraud band on the wholesale side. Whether the AT’s inspection footprint can carry the new model without slowing down legitimate cross-border supply will become visible inside the first quarter after entry into force.

The expected entry-into-force window is autumn 2026, contingent on the parliament’s technical pass. The fuel sector trade bodies, ACAP and APETRO, have been broadly supportive of the move—in part because the missing-trader schemes were squeezing the margins of compliant operators—but have asked for a 90-day transition window to update billing systems.

Sources: Público, ECO, Observador, Jornal de Negócios (11 June 2026).