Petitioner Takes Aim at Second CVD Review of Russian and Moroccan Phosphate Fertilizer
Petitioner The Mosaic Company brought two separate complaints to the Court of International Trade Jan. 13 contesting parts of the Commerce Department’s second countervailing duty review on Moroccan and Russian phosphate fertilizer, respectively (The Mosaic Company v. United States, CIT #s 24-00229, -230).
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Regarding the Morocco proceeding, Mosaic said Commerce shouldn’t have included in its value calculation what mandatory respondent OCP had characterized as its “2022 HQ/support costs and 2022 debt costs in the phosphate rock cost build-up.” Instead, the department should have followed Mosaic’s “proposed alternative allocation methodologies,” it said.
And Commerce shouldn’t have included Syrian and Egyptian prices in its phosphate rock price benchmark, while it should have included other prices for which Mosaic had advocated.
Mosaic also took issue with Commerce’s exclusion of “capital goods imported from free-trade agreement countries” for its calculation of the benefits provided by Morocco’s Customs Duty Exemptions for Capital Goods, Machinery, and Equipment program, and with Commerce’s decision to not countervail Morocco’s alleged provision of port services and infrastructure for less-than-adequate remuneration at all.
With respect to the Russia proceeding, Mosaic said Commerce picked the wrong tier 2 benchmark data when it selected Kazakh natural gas export prices. The department was wrong to find that those export prices were “available to” Russian purchasers, and it overlooked the fact that the Kazakh data was distorted by government interference, it claimed.
Instead, Commerce should have resorted to a tier 3 benchmark and selected IEA industry gas prices like it had in the original investigation, the petitioner argued.
Mosaic is currently in the midst of litigation regarding the department’s CVD investigation of Moroccan phosphate fertilizer, for which it also petitioned. That case recently saw the Court of International Trade send back Commerce’s “absurd” specificity finding regarding OCP’s participation in a Moroccan program providing relief from tax fines (see 2501090053).