A trial attorney at DOJ's international trade field office, Luke Mathers, has left the agency and joined Sandler Travis as an associate, according to his LinkedIn profile. Mathers joined DOJ in 2022 in the New York-based trade field office, where he worked on various customs and antidumping and countervailing duty matters. Prior to joining the agency, Mathers was an associate at Skadden.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices Nov. 19 on AD/CVD proceedings:
CBP illegally subjected importer Raymond Geddes & Company's pencils to antidumping duties on cased pencils from China, since the company's pencils are made in the Philippines, Raymond Geddes argued in a Nov. 14 complaint at the Court of International Trade. The importer said CBP improperly applied a scope ruling on a separate importer, School Specialty, to its goods (Raymond Geddes & Company v. United States, CIT # 25-00265).
The Commerce Department on Nov. 17 flipped its position on remand in a case on a new shipper review, finding that exporter Co May Import-Export Company didn't make a "bona fide sale" of subject merchandise during the review period (Catfish Farmers of America v. United States, CIT # 24-00126).
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Antidumping duty respondent Oman Fasteners opened a lawsuit last week against its former counsel, Perkins Coie, for legal malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty in its representation of the exporter in AD proceedings on steel nails from Oman. Filing suit in Washington state court, Oman Fasteners centered on two alleged mistakes made by the Perkins Coie attorneys: the failure to submit a fully translated surrogate financial statement in the AD investigation and to meet a filing deadline in the sixth review of the AD order, which led to a total adverse facts available AD rate.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission published the following Federal Register notices Nov. 18 on AD/CVD proceedings:
The following lawsuits were filed recently at the Court of International Trade:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Nov. 17 issued its mandate in a countervailing duty case on the application of the Commerce Department's cross-ownership regulation to respondent Gujarat Fluorochemicals in the CVD investigation on polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) resin from India (see 2510080027). Last month, the court said the regulation turns on whether the purpose of the subsidy provided to a cross-owned input provider "is to benefit the production of both the input and downstream products." The court said the Court of International Trade was right to reject Commerce's application of this regulation to Gujarat (Gujarat Fluorochemicals v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 24-1268).
The Commerce Department reasonably decided not to attribute subsidies provided to Nur Gemicilik, an affiliated input supplier of countervailing duty respondent Kaptan Demir, to Kaptan itself in the 2018 CVD review on Turkish rebar, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held on Nov. 17. Judges Raymond Chen, Richard Linn and Todd Hughes said Commerce properly identified that the unprocessed steel scrap Nur provided Kaptan was a "common input" and that the agency didn't place undue weight on consideration of Nur's main business activity.