Circumvention Investigation on Vietnamese Plywood Wasn’t Procedurally Flawed, Petitioner Says

Petitioner Coalition for Fair Trade in Hardwood Plywood submitted its defense of the government Aug. 19 in a large, complex court case brought initially by importer Shelter Forest. The importer claims Commerce wrongly rejected important factual information that demonstrated that its exporter’s plywood was made in Vietnam, not China (see 2307260077). The case has since grown to include a number of other importers and Vietnamese exporters of the product.

In their first motion for judgment, U.S. importers and Vietnamese exporters argued that Commerce’s overall investigation was flawed. The plaintiffs said that the department never named a mandatory respondent, instead relying on the information of the now-defunct mandatory respondent to the original scope inquiry, Vietnam Finewood.

In turn, the government said that it couldn’t select any individual respondents because none of the exporters who responded to a survey questionnaire manufactured plywood under the process Commerce was examining (see 2407030078). The coalition agreed.

“Respondents' argument has no legal basis and misinterprets the nature of a circumvention proceeding,” it said.

“As an initial matter,” it said, the department’s decision to not select a mandatory respondent meant it had essentially individually examined every respondent; and the importers and exporters “fail to explain how collecting information from all participating companies is somehow at odds with Commerce's requirements.”

The plaintiffs also alleged that Commerce’s fact-finding “consisted of about six pages of questions and a few Excel charts over eight months,” and that the department mostly relied on Finewood’s data and “hypothetical” information submitted by the coalition.

First, the coalition disagreed that the government’s fact-finding had been inadequate. Like the U.S., it called the information collection for the investigation “extensive.”

The importers and exporters also had the chance to rebut, correct or explain Finewood’s data, it said.

And in their attacks on the coalition’s data, the plaintiffs “do not engage with the substance of the information,” it said. Instead, it said, they were simply trying to call it flawed because it came from a petitioner. It argued they attempted to discredit that information as “secondary sources,” but they didn’t have any legal reason that the information couldn’t be considered.

The coalition went on to address a few other attacks levied by the plaintiffs. The importers and exporters had claimed that the proceeding was too long, but this was unsurprising “given the complexity of this proceeding and Commerce's extensive information collection,” it said.

And it said that the exporter’s processing in Vietnam was “minor and insignificant.” The importers and exporters claimed that the only method of circumvention defined by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act was “screwdriver” operations, but that isn’t true, the coalition argued; the Round’s Statement of Administrative Action mentions screwdriver operations “as an example” of circumvention, but doesn’t limit circumvention to screwdriver operations alone, it said.