The Court of International Trade on Oct. 22 backed the Commerce Department's decision to pick Malaysia as the primary surrogate country in an antidumping duty review, despite using a Romanian company's financial statements to determine the surrogate financial ratios is backed by substantial evidence. Sustaining Commerce's remand results in the AD review, Chief Judge Mark Barnett also upheld the agency's surrogate value selection for bituminous coal, an input of the subject merchandise of the review, activated carbon, and Commerce's financial ratio calculations.
The European Union General Court dismissed a case brought by Russian steel company Novolipetsk Steel, holding in an Oct. 20 order that antidumping duties don't discriminate against goods that are subject to existing safeguard measures. Novolipetsk challenged the commission's antidumping duties on hot-rolled flat products of iron, non-alloy or other alloy steel and cold-rolled flat steel products from Russia. The commission had also established safeguard measures that applied tariff quotas for 26 categories of steel products, including the HRF and CRF goods.
Applications are due Nov. 22 for inclusion on a roster of potential panelists for USMCA dispute settlement cases involving antidumping duty proceedings and amendments to AD/CVD laws. USTR reviews its roster of 25 panelists annually, and this round will cover April 1, 2022, through March 31, 2023. Canada and Mexico also keep rosters of 25. Applicants should be of “good character and of high standing and repute, and are to be chosen strictly on the basis of their objectivity, reliability, sound judgment, and general familiarity with international trade law,” USTR said. Roster members may not be affiliated with any of the three USMCA governments, except for judges, who will be appointed to the roster “to the fullest extent practicable.”
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices Oct. 25 on AD/CV duty proceedings:
The Court of International Trade remanded parts and sustained parts of the Commerce Department's final determination in the antidumping investigation into utility scale wind towers from Canada in an Oct. 22 opinion. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves sent back Commerce's decision to reject respondent Marmen's additional cost reconciliation information and use of the average-to-transaction methodology to discover masked dumping, while upholding the agency's weight-average of Marmen's plate costs, use of invoice dates as the date of sale, use of Marmen's reported sales of tower sections rather than complete towers, and decision not to apply facts otherwise available.
The Court of International Trade on Oct. 22 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in a case over the 11th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on activated carbon from China. Chief Judge Mark Barnett upheld Commerce's decision to pick Malaysia over Romania as the primary surrogate country in the review, despite the fact that Commerce used the financial statements from a Romanian company to calculate the surrogate financial ratios. Barnett also sustained Commerce's surrogate value selections for bituminous coal, an input of activated carbon, and the agency's financial ratio calculations.
The following new requests for antidumping and countervailing duty scope rulings were recently filed with the Commerce Department:
The Commerce Department wrongly applied a seasonality finding to one company, rather than an entire industry, when it retroactively suspended liquidation for many companies at the preliminary stage of the antidumping and countervailing duty investigations on pentafluoroethane (R-125) from China, A-Gas Americas said in a brief filed with the Commerce Department Oct. 19.
The Commerce Department's decision not to grant a constructed export price offset in an antidumping duty investigation based on the claim that mandatory respondent Interpipe Ukraine didn't separately report the selling functions and the level at which it performed those functions from each home market channel of distribution runs contrary to the law, Interpipe argued in an Oct. 21 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Interpipe also pushed back against Commerce's decision to deduct Section 232 duties from its U.S. price when calculating its dumping margin (Interpipe Ukraine LLC, et al. v. United States, CIT #21-00530).
The Commerce Department's decision to use the Turkish lira value of home market sales rather than the U.S. dollar in an antidumping duty review deviated from the agency's standard practice and distorted an exporter's AD duty rate, the exporter, Habas Sinai ve Tibbi Gazlar Istihsal Endustrisi, said in an Oct. 20 complaint at the Court of International Trade (Habas Sinai ve Tibbi Gazlar Istihsal Endustrisi A.S. v. United States, CIT #21-00527).