Frozen Fish Exporters Say Commerce Didn't Explain 'Divergent' US Price in New Shipper Review
Petitioner Catfish Farmers of America said again March 14 that a new Vietnamese frozen fish fillet exporter’s single U.S. sale wasn’t bona fide. The government’s arguments to the contrary (see 2502130061) contradicted its own past practice and were post hoc justifications, it said (Catfish Farmers of America v. United States, CIT # 24-00126).
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Catfish Farmers said that new shipper Co May’s sole export sale hadn’t been made at arms length (see 2412270040). It pointed to the fact that the exporter’s U.S. sale price differed from Co May’s sales prices in other markets.
The government said that Co May’s U.S. and third-country sales prices didn’t have to be identical, but this “misses the mark twice over,” the petitioner said.
First, it said, the Commerce Department was required to analyze the record evidence and “provide an adequate explanation as to why Co May’s divergent U.S. sales price may nevertheless be typical of the company’s general selling behavior and likely future U.S. sales” -- it has even called the analysis "important" in the past, the petitioner said.
Further, the government’s claim that Commerce couldn’t find a price to be atypical without first looking to the average unit values “prevailing at the time of sale” hadn’t been raised by the department, making it a post hoc rationalization, it said.
It also said that DOJ didn’t repeat the Commerce Department’s other argument “that different markets might have different price points depending on conditions, tacitly conceding that this position is speculative, unsupported by the record and, at the very least, unexplained in Commerce's final decision.”
“This alone merits remand,” it said.
The petitioner also repeated that the department “did not properly explain or support its conclusion” that Co May’s U.S. sales price was “commercially reasonable because it fell in the center of the distribution” of mandatory respondents’ U.S. prices in a “POR-adjacent” antidumping review. It said the government had failed in "not showing its work."
And it said that the U.S.’s citation to Tianjin “verges on the bizarre” because it meant the U.S. was appearing to “concede that Co May’s sales price was, in fact, ‘atypically high’” compared with the review respondents’ prices.
Catfish Farmers also said the government was wrong to claim that Co May’s customer’s subsequent resale price wasn’t relevant. The law, it said, “explicitly requires Commerce” to consider "whether the subject merchandise ... was resold in the United States at a profit.”