The Court of International Trade in an Oct. 30 opinion sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in a case on the 2017-18 antidumping review of multilayered wood flooring from China. Judge Richard Eaton said Commerce properly calculated the surrogate manufacturing overhead ratio by using the indirect production expenses amount in the numerator and listing its reasons for taking out energy costs and putting them in the denominator. The judge also upheld the use of Romania's International Labor Organization data to calculate the surrogate's hourly labor value, saying "the data reflects hours actually worked in the surrogate country."
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices Oct. 30 on AD/CVD proceedings:
The Commerce Department will review whether to grant Vietnam market economy status in antidumping duty proceedings, it announced in a notice released Oct. 27 that begins a changed circumstances review.
Canadian exporter Tolko Industries, a non-individually examined company in the 2021 review of the antidumping duty order on Canadian softwood lumber, said its 6.2% dumping rate was not backed by substantial evidence. Filing a complaint at the Court of International Trade on Oct. 27, Tolko said that since its rate was derived from rates for the two mandatory respondents which themselves were not supported by substantial evidence, its rate is illegal (Tolko Industries v. United States, CIT # 23-00204).
A World Trade Organization panel will review U.S. antidumping duties on oil country tubular goods from Argentina after Argentina's request for a dispute panel was granted by the Dispute Settlement Body, the WTO announced. Argentina's request was the second in its case arguing that the duties violate WTO rules and that the U.S. illegally cumulated imports in assessing injury caused by the subject imports.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices Oct. 27 on AD/CVD proceedings:
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Oct. 26 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 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an Oct. 26 order granted a two-week extension for exporter Tau-Ken Temir and Kazakhstan's Ministry of Trade and Integration to file their reply brief in a case on the countervailing duty investigation on silicon metal from Kazakhstan. TKT and the trade ministry recently also asked the court for an additional 7,000 words in the reply brief, prompting the court to stay briefing until it can resolve the motion for the expanded word count (Tau-Ken Temir v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 22-2204).
The Court of International Trade in an Oct. 25 text-only order denied as moot the renewed motion by the U.S. to stay proceedings in an Enforce and Protect Act case, pending final resolution of a related matter. The present case, Far East American v. U.S., concerns an antidumping and countervailing duty evasion determination on two-ply hardwood products from China. The government asked for a stay while another case brought by Far East American went through the trade court. CIT ruled on that one in August, finding that the Commerce Department properly excluded hardwood plywood made by Vietnam Finewood using two-ply panels imported into Vietnam from China from the scope of the orders (see 2308220033). The stay in Far East American's second case was dropped following the ruling (Far East American v. U.S., CIT # 22-00213).
The Commerce Department, on remand at the Court of International Trade, switched to using Brazilian surrogate value information to value antidumping duty respondent Jiangsu Senmao Bamboo and Wood Industry Co.'s non-oak log inputs. Changing course as part of the 2019-20 AD review of multilayered wood flooring from China, Commerce switched to using Brazilian data, the primary surrogate nation, after the trade court rejected its initial use of Malaysian data for the factors of production (Jiangsu Senmao Bamboo and Wood Industry Co. v. U.S., CIT # 22-00190).