VAT when selling services to EU company via UK middleman

[sigh]

Hello. I'm a VAT-registered business in the UK selling consultancy services, mainly to other UK clients.

We currently have a situation where one of our UK clients is acting as a middleman for a company in the EU (France) on a particular project (selling our services as well as some of their own services). We invoice the UK company and they then invoice the French company. The outputs of our work will be digital documents (basically bespoke presentations of the results of our consultancy work).

We are being told by our UK client that because they are invoicing the French client without VAT (zero rated services) we should send invoices also without VAT.

Is this correct? My understanding was that as we're billing a UK client, and delivering our services / documentation to a UK client that we would add VAT as standard.

Is there any way to avoid charging VAT in this context? Such as getting the French clients VAT registration number and marking the invoice as reverse charge? Or by emailing the documentation direct to the end client?

Thanks so much in advance for all of your help. As you can probably tell by the above I'm slightly at sea here!

[Lavenderu2306]

The short answer is no.
The middleman is acting as undisclosed agent, which means he is acting on his own name and this is why you are invoicing him rather than the French .
In this scenario you are right to charge the U.K. middleman VAT .
He is not charging VAT the French because that supply falls under reverse charge scheme and is outside the scope of U.K. VAT.