Commerce Wrongly Countervailed Exporter for Bauxite Mining Rights, Coal, Exporter Says
Indian aluminum sheet exporter Hindalco Industries brought a complaint Jan. 10 to the Court of International Trade, saying the Commerce Department wrongly found to be specific programs by which Hindalco had been provided bauxite mining rights and coal and bauxite by the government of India for less-than-adequate remuneration (Hindalco Industries v. United States, CIT # 24-00234).
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To make its specificity finding regarding coal, the department had to group India’s utility power and captive power industries, Hindalco said. This grouping ignored evidence that the two are completely different: utility power industries output energy, while captive power industries are composed of “numerous different manufacturing industries with various kinds of manufacturing output,” it said.
Commerce also used wrongly only U.N. Comtrade data, provided to it by the petitioners of the countervailing duty review, for coal export prices, the exporter said. But Comtrade's coal data doesn’t differentiate by coal grade, while Hindalco only purchases coal “on a grade-specific basis,” it said.
Meanwhile, the department found Hindalco was a specific beneficiary of bauxite mining rights because the Indian government controls all mining rights, and, as “only through holding mining rights would a company have the means to operate a bauxite mine, the provision of bauxite mining rights are de facto specific to mining rights holders as predominant users,” Hindalco said, citing Commerce’s preliminary decision memo.
But the Indian government doesn’t specifically regulate bauxite mining rights, the exporter said -- it regulates all mineral mining rights in the same way. It argued this was the context in which the department should have conducted its “predominant user” analysis.
The department also wrongly calculated the benefit Hindalco allegedly received from its LTAR mining rights using a tier-one bauxite price benchmark that only looked to Hindalco’s imports of bauxite, and not to its domestic purchases of the mineral as well.
It said the department should have first found that India’s overall bauxite market was distorted by government involvement. But the department only considered mining rights, and “lost sight of the fact that the bauxite mining rights market is distinct from the bauxite market,” the exporter claimed.