Commerce Drops AFA for Chinese Wood Flooring Exporter On Remand
The Commerce Department published July 9 its remand results of its 2018 countervailing duty review of Chinese-origin multilayered wood flooring, reversing its use of adverse facts available for exporter Senmao after deciding Senmao’s customers didn’t use China’s Export Buyers Credit Program (Evolutions Flooring v. United States, CIT Consol. #21-00591).
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It also corrected an error in its calculation of benefits for the other mandatory respondent, Riverside Plywood, although it maintained its use of AFA for the exporter.
The government sought a voluntary remand to reconsider the use of AFA for Senmao in March (see 2503280020). It said in its July 9 results that Senmao submitted EBCP non-use declarations for all of its customers, whereas Riverside Plywood only provided declarations for “a subset” of its customers.
It said that it determined in its initial results that the declarations weren’t enough because the Chinese government had refused to provide the 2013 revisions to its Administrative Measures of Export Buyer’s Credit of the Export-Import Bank of China, nor any information on “all partner/correspondent banks involved in the disbursement of funds under the EBCP” or “documentation of direct or indirect export credits from the China Export Import Bank.”
It changed its mind regarding Senmao, saying the non-use declarations provided by Senmao’s customers were enough to fill gaps in the record created by this missing information.
The department also corrected an “inadvertent error” in its calculation of the benefit Riverside Plywood received regarding its purchase of an input, veneers, from its cross-owned affiliate Baroque Timber for less-than-adequate remuneration.
Its original results had calculated this value using, in part, warehouse-in slip quantities for Baroque Timber’s backboard, face and fiberboard veneer purchases, it said. It explained that it used the slips because they let the department convert Baroque Timber’s purchases from batches into kilograms. Riverside Plywood pointed out, however, that Commerce could have relied on the cubic meter quantities on Baroque Timber’s backboard invoices, so the department switched to using the invoices for backboard veneers while sticking to its original calculations for the affiliate’s face and fiberboard veneer purchases.