The Commerce Department released a final rule making extensive changes to its antidumping and countervailing duty regulations, including on scope and anti-circumvention inquiries. Currently scheduled for publication Sept. 20, the final rule is intended to “strengthen the administration and enforcement of AD/CVD laws, make such administration and enforcement more efficient, and to create new enforcement tools for Commerce to address circumvention and evasion of trade remedies.”
The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in the 13th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on fish fillets from Vietnam in a Sept. 27 order. In the review, Commerce applied total adverse facts available to the mandatory respondents, leading to a $3.87/kg dumping margin which the court upheld in a previous decision. Commerce also extended this rate to the non-individually reviewed "separate rate" respondents, which the court remanded. Under protest, Commerce set the separate rate by averaging the separate rates from the previous four administrative reviews, which the court ultimately sustained.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices Sept. 24 on AD/CV duty proceedings:
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
Solar panel exporter MS Solar Investments is seeking targeted discovery of documents relating to the liquidation of its solar panel exports to determine if decisions made by CBP and the Commerce Department were erroneous, MS Solar said in a Sept. 22 letter to the Court of International Trade (MS Solar Investments, LLC v. United States, CIT #21-00303).
The Commerce Department cannot make a particular market situation adjustment in the sales-below-cost test when calculating normal value, the Court of International Trade again ruled in a Sept. 23 opinion. Pointing to multiple CIT rulings reaching the same conclusion (see 2107210065), Judge Gary Katzmann said that since the statute in one section has language permitting a PMS adjustment but excludes it in the section on normal value adjustments, Commerce could not make the PMS adjustment. Katzmann also said that even if such an adjustment were allowed, Commerce did not provide enough evidence that a PMS existed.
A company challenging CBP's finding that it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on xanthan gum should have its lawsuit tossed because it failed to appeal CBP's denial of its protest on the relevant entries, even though the importer filed its case under CIT's Section 1581(c) jurisdiction, which covers AD/CVD proceedings, the Department of Justice said in a Sept. 22 reply brief at the Court of International Trade (All One God Faith, Inc., et al. v. United States, CIT #20-00164).
The Court of International Trade sustained in part and remanded in part the Commerce Department's second remand results in a case over the antidumping duty administrative review of passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China in a Sept. 24 order. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves found that Commerce's denial of separate rate status to Pirelli Tyre Co. during the first ten months of the review period was unreasonable, because the company was not Chinese government-controlled for that part of the period of review. Choe-Groves also sustained Commerce's decision to drop a downward adjustment for irrecoverable value-added tax to mandatory respondent Qingdao Sentury Tire Co.'s export price.
The Court of International Trade remanded an antidumping case to the Commerce Department for a fourth time, finding that the agency's method for finding an all-others dumping rate was unreasonable. The court issued the opinion in a case over the AD duty investigation of hardwood plywood products from China in which the agency assigned the two mandatory respondents a zero percent and 114.72% adverse facts available rate. When finding the all-others rate, Commerce then departed from the expected method -- a move upheld by the court -- and averaged the two rates to get to a 57.36% all-others rate. CIT said rate was based on only one commercial invoice from the AD petition and not reasonably reflective of the all-other respondents' dumping margins.
The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's final results in the antidumping duty investigation of certain quartz surface products from China, in Sept. 24 opinion. Judge Leo Gordon upheld Commerce's selection of Mexico as the primary surrogate country over Malaysia for the purposes of calculating normal value. Seeing as the plaintiffs needed to prove that Malaysia was the "one and only reasonable surrogate country selection" in order for the court to justify the switch, Gordon ruled in favor of Commerce since the plaintiffs failed to make this demonstration, the opinion said.