Commerce Department Stands By Use of 'Public' Financial Statements on Remand
The Commerce Department stood by its usage of financial statements in an antidumping duty review on mattresses from Vietnam in remand results filed with the Court of International Trade Feb. 23. Following a remand by Judge Timothy Reif, Commerce continued to determine that the financial data it used was complete and publicly available and continued to use that information to derive surrogate financial ratios, leaving the AD rate for plaintiff Ashley Furniture at 144.92% (Ashley Furniture Industries, et al. v. U.S., CIT # 21-00283).
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The case concerns the 2019 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on mattresses from Vietnam. In the review, Commerce used the financial statements of Emirates Sleep, an Indian producer of mattresses, to calculate surrogate financial ratios for the respondents. The plaintiffs, led by Ashley Furniture, then sued at trade court. Reif sent the case back to Commerce based on the plaintiffs' challenges to the completeness of Emirates Sleep's statements and their public availability, saying said Commerce did not address a missing statement, "Annexure 5," that included a section for short-term loans and advances that might have been necessary to calculate surrogate ratios (see 2212080061).
In the remand results, Commerce argued that the court's concern that Annexure 5 may have contained information about "distortive subsidies" was not possible because "if evidence of countervailable subsidies were present," Commerce would not consider Emirates Sleep’s financial statements as a basis for surrogate financial ratios because the statements would be distorted by those very subsidies. Therefore, the department said, Annexure 5 cannot categorically contain evidence of potentially countervailable subsidies.
Commerce also said that it continued to find Emirates Sleep's financial statements were publicly available. The department said that petitioners answered a January supplemental questionnaire to indicate that both the Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Zauba Corp. had provided access to the information.