The Court of International Trade on June 23 upheld the Commerce Department's use of exporter Dillinger Huttenwerke's likely selling price, taken from its books, to value the cost of production of its non-prime merchandise in an antidumping investigation. Judge Leo Gordon said the company's failure to fill the record with actual COP data for the non-prime products in the AD case on steel cut-to-length plate from Germany justified the agency's decision to use the likely selling price as a fill-in.
The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's decision not to collapse exporter Prosperity Tieh Enterprise Co. with the already-collapsed entity of Yieh Phui Enterprise Co. and Synn Industrial Co. as part of the antidumping duty investigation into corrosion resistant steel (CORE) products from Taiwan. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the trade court's opinion upholding the collapsing decision, Judge Timothy Stanceu said Commerce properly weighed the evidence to find the evidence was insufficient to show a significant potential for manipulation between Prosperity and Yieh Phui. The decision was made despite members of the same family owning both companies. The result was a 11.04% margin for Prosperity and a de minimis 1.20% margin for the Yieh Phui/Synn entity.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices June 23 on AD/CVD proceedings:
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on June 22 issued its mandate in a case on the 2017-18 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on activated carbon from China. The Federal Circuit said the Commerce Department properly valued an input of activated carbon using data from a country different from the primary surrogate nation (see 2305010028). The court said the agency's departure from its normal practice of preferring to take all the data from the primary surrogate country does not mean its decision was unsupported by substantial evidence (Carbon Activated Tianjin Co. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 22-1298).
The Commerce Department didn't violate the law by accepting information submitted by antidumping duty respondent Zhejiang Dingli Machinery Co. even though the data was labeled as business proprietary, the government said in a reply brief at the Court of International Trade. In the AD investigation on mobile access equipment and subassemblies from China, the U.S. said the information could only have been submitted as business proprietary information, and that the data was merely "supporting documentation for information already on the record" (Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment v. U.S., CIT # 22-00152).
The Court of International Trade in a June 22 confidential opinion upheld CBP's finding that a group of companies, led by American Pacific Plywood, evaded the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on hardwood plywood from China. In a letter to litigants, Judge M. Miller Baker gave the parties until June 29 to review the bracketed information in the opinion. In the case, BP said the companies evaded the duties by transshipping their products through Cambodia. The plaintiffs levied a host of due process violation allegations against CBP and said, among other things, the agency carried out an "unceasing attempt to crucify" exporter LB Wood Cambodia (see 2202040037) (American Pacific Plywood v. U.S., CIT # 20-03914).
The Commerce Department in a June 22 brief requested a partial voluntary remand at the Court of International Trade so it can fix a mistake in its decision to grant a byproduct offset for antidumping duty respondent NTSF Seafoods Joint Stock Co. The agency said it wanted the chance to review the decision after looking at evidence submitted by petitioner Catfish Farmers of America so that it can "reconsider the narrow issue of potential double counting" with regard to byproduct offsets that NTSF received (Catfish Farmers of America v. U.S., CIT # 20-00105).
The Court of International Trade on June 23 upheld Commerce's use of likely selling price instead of actual costs of production to calculate the cost of production of non-prime merchandise, after German exporter Dillinger failed to populate the record with actual COP data for the non-prime goods in an antidumping duty investigation on carbon and alloy steel cut-to-length plate from Germany. Judge Leo Gordon also sustained the use of partial adverse facts available on exporter Salzgitter due to its failure to report around 28,000 downstream sales. But the judge remanded the agency's rejection of Dillinger's proposed quality code for sour transport plate as part of the agency's model-match methodology because a previous court opinion rejected that methodology.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices June 22 on AD/CVD proceedings: