The Court of International Trade in a July 19 opinion upheld the Commerce Department's decision to assign exporter Double Coin Holdings the 105.31% China-wide antidumping duty rate in an administrative review of the AD order on off-the-road tires from China. Judge Timothy Stanceu said the decision complies with the court's previous decision finding that Double Coin did not rebut the presumption of Chinese state control over its export activities. No parties commented on the remand results.
The Court of International Trade in a July 20 opinion refused to invalidate its past order instructing CBP to reliquidate Target Corp.'s metal-top ironing tables, saying that doing so would "turn the clock back over 40 years" prior to the Customs Courts Act's passage and "again call into question whether a party before the Court could obtain full and complete relief." Reversing the order as Target requests would "elevate the principle of finality" of liquidation "over the inherent power" of the trade court under Article III of the Constitution, Judge Leo Gordon said.
The Court of International Trade in a July 19 opinion upheld the Commerce Department's decision to raise the dumping margins in the 2018-19 administrative review of the antidumping duties on heavy-walled rectangular welded carbon steel pipes and tubes from Mexico for mandatory respondents Maquilacero and Prolamsa. The margins were raised from 0% to 3.48% for Maquilacero. and from 0% to 2.11%. for Prolamsa.
Importer Amsted Rail Co. voluntarily dismissed its conflict-of-interest suit against the Commerce Department at the Court of International Trade. The case, involving the company's former counsel Daniel Pickard, now partner at Buchanan Ingersoll, was previously stayed pending resolution of a related matter against the International Trade Commission. Amsted earlier this month also dismissed the ITC matter at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after the importer filed a joint stipulation of voluntary dismissal (see 2307050052) (Amsted Rail Co. v. U.S., CIT # 22-00316).
The Commerce Department has "muddled together irrelevant and tangential statistical concepts in a future effort to obscure" that the agency "is not really using" the Cohen's d test to root out "masked" dumping, the Canadian government and a group of Canadian companies argued in a proposed amicus brief. Filing the brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a suit over the antidumping duty investigation on utility scale wind towers from Canada, the Canadian government said Commerce "plugs numbers into the Cohen's d formula," but the inputs do not match the criteria under which the formula provides "meaningful information" (Marmen Inc. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1877).
Tire exporter Guizhou Tyre Co. and Guizhou Tyre Import and Export Co. will appeal a Court of International Trade decision upholidng the Commerce Department's finding that Guizhou failed to rebut the presumption of government control in the antidumping duty investigation on truck and bus tires from China. Per the notice of appeal, the companies will take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In the opinion, the trade court said that despite Commerce's "inartful and internally-inconsistent approach" to answering whether a company majority-owned by a government entity could ever prove to be free of government control, the agency did enough here to show that Guizhou's largest shareholder was still run by the government (see 2305230060) (Guizhou Tyre Co. v. United States, CIT Consol. # 19-00031).
The Court of International Trade in a July 17 order denied importer Nature's Touch Frozen Foods (West)'s motion for stay of enforcement of judgment pending appeal in a customs dispute on the classification of frozen fruit mixtures. Judge Stephen Vaden said that in light of the U.S. claim that it will "take no action to reliquidate the entries at issue" until the importer's appeal is resolved, the court dismisses the motion as moot (Nature's Touch Frozen Foods (West) v. U.S., CIT # 20-00131).
Australian exporter BlueScope Steel is asking the Court of International Trade to overturn the International Trade Commission's decision to cumulate imports from Australia with shipments from other countries in its sunset review of the AD orders on the steel goods from Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Turkey and the U.K. (BlueScope Steel v. U.S., CIT # 22-00353).
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Judge Pauline Newman will begin mediation at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia with three of her colleagues leading an investigation on her fitness to continue serving on the bench, on Aug. 3. Per a joint notice of continuation of deadline to file a report on mediation, the parties said that they set a date with Judge Thomas Griffith, who was appointed to preside over the mediation (see 2307110045). Griffith sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2005 to 2020 (Newman v. Moore, D.D.C. # 23-01334).
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative exceeded its authority in imposing the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs on China, covering a total of $320 billion worth of Chinese imports, plaintiff-appellants in the massive case against the duties, led by HTMX Industries and Jasco Products Co., argued in their opening brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Appealing the Court of International Trade's decision upholding the tariffs (see 2204010061), the companies said USTR did not have the authority to set the duties since the authority was not directly delegated by Congress, in violation of the "major questions doctrine" (HMTX Industries v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1891).