Plywood Exporter's New Information Not Enough to Overturn Evasion Finding, US Says
New evidence provided by importers found to have evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese plywood after a Royal Brush-driven remand was insufficient to change the ultimate finding of the investigation, the United States said Dec. 13 in response to the importers’ remand redetermination comments (American Pacific Plywood v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 20-03914).
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CBP based its finding that importer InterGlobal Forest, the only plaintiff to contest the remand redetermination, transshipped its product through Cambodia on “substantial” record evidence, the government said. This included the fact that CBP couldn’t substantiate the production capacity of InterGlobal’s alleged Cambodian manufacturer, LB Wood Cambodia Co., but found inconsistencies in the manufacturer’s records “between manufacturing dates and production records, and instances where amounts packaged and shipped were greater than amounts produced.” The evidence also included an on-site visit to Cambodia by CBP, it said.
In turn, after a voluntary remand to account for Royal Brush, InterGlobal submitted two declarations, one by InterGlobal Chief Operating Officer Kurt Winn and one by LB Wood General Manager Fu Wenjie, that the importer had purchased its product from Cambodia. It also gave CBP photographic exhibits and further written arguments. CBP, however, continued to find that InterGlobal had transshipped (see 2405300058).
InterGlobal argued in comments (see 2409160049) that the declarations it had submitted were “under penalty of perjury, something that CBP cavalierly dismisses and disregards as biased and untrustworthy.” It called them “unrefuted testimony.” It also alleged that the photographs it provided proved LB Wood’s manufacturing facilities had been fully operational when they were visited by CBP.
But CBP “found that the rebuttal information had ‘no substantive value’ and only further supported the conclusions previously reached by the agency,” the government said in its Dec. 13 brief. Winn’s declaration was “largely duplicative,” it said. And a photo allegedly taken by Winn during a visit to LB Wood was suspect because “no assurance exists that the date below the photograph is legitimate, given that the photograph was not provided during the [Enforce and Protect Act] investigation.”
The only new information in LB Wood's Wenjie’s declaration, meanwhile, was “subjective opinion,” it said. And the declaration didn’t rebut CBP’s finding that LB Wood didn’t have the necessary production capacity because it was found to be “unreliable,” appearing “to inflate LB Wood’s production capacity during June 2018,” the government said.
“Customs also found Wenjie’s claim regarding the number of employees working at LB Wood’s factory at the time of Customs’ visit questionable in light of … observations and photographs from that site visit,” it said.
On the other hand, other record evidence supported CBP’s determination, it said. The government said that, during its site visit, CBP noticed that one of LB Wood’s machines was “small, broken up into multiple pieces, and covered with a thick layer of dust.” Further, “wood present in the factory did not appear to be available in Cambodia,” it said.
InterGlobal was only speculating that CBP hadn’t provided the exporter all the confidential information about its on-site visit it used in its determination, it said.
And the importer’s claim that two-ply plywood from Vietnam wasn’t covered by antidumping and countervailing duties on plywood from China -- because the orders required “at least three plies” -- was equally invalid because “the issue of how many plies the plywood had is not part of the record in the investigation at issue here,” it said.