The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit remanded in part and sustained in part the Commerce Department's final determination in an antidumping investigation into welded line pipe from South Korea in a July 15 opinion. The appellate court affirmed all but one of the Court of International Trade's findings, sending the case back to Commerce to reconsider the use of Cohen's d test in its differential pricing analysis when seeking to assign a dumping margin for goods having undergone "masked dumping."
The Commerce Department will only partially apply adverse facts available for sales a diamond sawblade exporter made to its U.S. affiliate, which used a first-in-first-out methodology to keep track of its country of origin data when calculating the exporter's antidumping rate, it said in remand results filed by the agency July 13. The filing comes to the Court of International Trade after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit left it up to the trade court to determine if a further remand was needed. The Federal Circuit held that a remand was appropriate for Commerce to determine if it could disregard the exporter's U.S. sales using the FIFO methodology (Diamond Sawblades Manufacturers' Coalition v. United States, CIT #17-00167).
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices July 13-14 on AD/CV duty proceedings:
Lisa Wang has been chosen by the Biden administration for the role of assistant secretary for enforcement and compliance at the Commerce Department. Wang specializes in trade policy and antidumping and countervailing duty litigation at Picard, Kentz and Rowe, where she is a partner. She also was a senior attorney in the Office of the Chief Counsel for Trade Enforcement and Compliance at Commerce before going to the private sector, and worked as assistant general counsel in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. She also worked as senior import administration officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Wang graduated from Georgetown University Law Center and from Cornell University. Her nomination was announced July 13.
The Commerce Department submitted its remand results to the Court of International Trade on July 12 in an antidumping administrative review on multilayered wood flooring, dropping one of the mandatory respondents from the review in response to a ruling in a separate case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Fine Furniture (Shanghai) Limited, et al. v. United States, CIT # 14-00135). Following multiple court decisions and remand results, proceedings in Fine Furniture's case were stayed pending the results of the Federal Circuit appeal in Changzhou Hawd Flooring Co., Ltd. v. United States. The eventual decision found that Fine Furniture is not subject to the antidumping order since the mandatory respondents in the underlying AD order received de minimis duty rates in Commerce's final determination (see 2106020069). CIT lifted the stay and remanded the case to exclude Fine Furniture from the review and recalculate the rate for the separate respondents. As a result of Fine Furniture's departure from the review, and the other two mandatory respondents in the review having zero percent antidumping duty margins, the AD rate for all separate rate respondents would fall to zero percent, should the rate be sustained.
The Court of International Trade on July 12 upheld the Commerce Department's pick of Romania over Malaysia as a surrogate country in an antidumping case, but sent back to the agency the resulting financial ratio calculation of a Romanian company. Since Commerce failed to address the concerns of mandatory respondent Ancientree Cabinets, Judge Gary Katzmann directed Commerce to reconsider Ancientree's objections. Other aspects of the investigation under contention, namely the selection of Romania over Malaysia and Commerce's picks for product input surrogate values, were upheld by Katzmann.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a Court of International Trade ruling dismissing an importer's challenge of CBP's assessment of antidumping and countervailing duties for improper jurisdiction, in a July 14 opinion. The Federal Circuit found that TR International Trading Co., which filed its case under the trade court's Section 1581(i) "residual" jurisdiction provision, could have instead challenged a denied protest under 1581(a) or a scope ruling under 1581(c), rendering Section 1581(i) unavailable. TRI had challenged CBP's finding that the company's citric acid imports from India were of Chinese origin and subject to AD/CV duties.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices July 13 on AD/CV duty proceedings:
The Commerce Department filed its remand results in the Court of International Trade on July 12 in a case over the 2016-17 administrative review of the antdiumping duty order on oil country tubular goods from South Korea. The results mirror the redeterminations made in another case filed by the same company, SeAH Steel Co., in which Commerce dropped its finding of a particular market situation (see 2107010048). After the court said that there was not enough evidence to support the agency's finding that the Korean steel market was heavily subsidized and there was a global glut of key inputs for the oil tubes from China, Commerce no longer applied the PMS adjustment, but noted its disagreement with the court over how to weigh the evidence (SeAH Steel Co. v. United States, CIT #19-00086).
In a pair of decisions, the Court of International Trade upheld two remand results that strike pin anchors are not within the scope of the antidumping duty orders on steel nails from China and Vietnam. In one, CIT sustained the Commerce Department's third remand results that strike pin anchors are not within the scope of the antidumping duty order on steel nails from China, in a July 12 opinion. The decision applied recent precedent from a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit over whether masonry anchors imported by OMG are subject to antidumping and countervailing duty orders on steel nails from Vietnam (see 2008280039). In another July 12 opinion, the court sustained Commerce remand results finding that Fastenal Company Purchasing's zinc and nylon anchors "do not fall within the scope of Commerce’s antidumping order on certain steel nails from China."