Three importers of trailer wheels filed complaints in the Court of International Trade on Jan. 30 contesting the Commerce Department’s determination that their wheels were subject to antidumping and countervailing duties and the importers had attempted to evade them (Trailstar LLC v. U.S., CIT # 24-00021; Lionshead Specialty Tire and Wheel LLC v. U.S., CIT # 24-00020; Dexter Distribution Group LLC v. U.S., CIT # 24-00019).
Commerce incorrectly determined that discs, the inner structures of wheels, share the essential characteristics of wheels and are substantially the same products, an exporter said to the Court of International Trade in a Jan. 30 motion for judgment (Asia Wheel Co. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00143).
The Court of International Trade on Jan. 31 remanded for a third time the Commerce Department's use of Mexican wage data to calculate surrogate labor costs in the antidumping duty investigation on beer kegs from China. Judge M. Miller Baker said Commerce abused its discretion in rejecting Brazilian data, favored by petitioner American Keg, and continuing to use Mexican International Labour Organization data.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices Jan. 30-31 on AD/CVD proceedings:
The Commerce Department on Jan. 31 finalized an interim rule on the dispute settlement mechanism for reviewing antidumping and countervailing duty decisions from the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The rule references the provision under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement as opposed to the relevant article under the North American Free Trade Agreement -- the predecessor to the USMCA.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Jan. 29-30 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
The following trade-related lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
A rebar exporter received a specific subsidy from the Turkish government’s tax exemption program for companies that engage in foreign exchange, the U.S. and countervailing duty petitioner said Jan. 29 in response to that exporter’s motion for summary judgment. They also said the exporter provided unreliable benchmark value data, justifying the Commerce Department’s use of data from the petitioner, the Rebar Trade Action Coalition, instead (Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret v. U.S., CIT #23-00131).
Pipe importers supported CBP's final redetermination on remand that imported Chinese-origin “rough” carbon steel butt-weld pipe fittings, which only undergo the first stage of processing in China, aren't covered by the antidumping duty order on the finished products. They asked for their suspended entries to be liquidated (Norca Industrial Co. v. United States, CIT Consol. # 21-00192).
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