Commerce Wrongly Narrowing Scope of Tires AD/CVD Orders in Scope Ruling, Petitioner Says
Petitioner United Steel, Paper, and Forestry said March 24 that the U.S. was wrongly seeking to narrow the scope of passenger vehicle and light truck tires from Taiwan (United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union v. United States, CIT # 24-00165).
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The case revolves around antidumping duty and countervailing duty orders on light truck tires that fit within a list of defined sizes as put out by an industry publication, the TRA Year Book -- but the scope expressly didn’t list subject products to that list, the petitioner said.
The U.S., it said, unlawfully treated the plain language of the scope as “mere surplusage” by saying that defining subject merchandise was “dependent on” the industry publication. That was reading the phrase “including, but not limited to” out of the scope, it said. It argued that the Court of International Trade recently rejected another, similar, scope interpretation that did the same in the case Asia Wheel.
It also claimed the U.S. and exporter, defendant-intervenor Cheng Shin Rubber USA, were inventing “out of whole cloth” a requirement that covered tires be “regular service,” exempting Cheng Shin’s spare tires. The exporter had even said those words should be added, U.S. Steel noted.
This was adding an end-use provision to the orders’ scope that wasn’t actually present in the language, it claimed. In fact, it said, part of the scope language actually did indicate some spare tires should be covered as it specifically exempted certain spare tire models based on characteristics such as size and tread depth.
And the petitioner denied it had failed to exhaust its administrative remedies. It said that, “[c]ritically,” the U.S. acknowledged in its own brief that the Commerce Department “did consider the issues raised by the scope inquiry and USW’s request.”
It also said that certain issues first arose in Commerce’s final scope ruling, past the point that it could respond.