35Accordingly, that provision creates the legal fiction of two identical supplies of services provided consecutively. Under that fiction, the operator, who takes part in the supply of services and who constitutes the commission agent, is considered to have, firstly, received the services in question from the operator on behalf of whom it acts, who constitutes the principal, before providing, secondly, those services to the client himself. It follows that, as regards the legal relationship between the principal and the commission agent, their respective roles of service provider and payer are notionally inversed for the purposes of VAT.
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