Double Remedies Calculated Based on Potential Price Impact of Subsidies, CIT Rules
In a July 21 opinion made public July 25, the Court of International Trade remanded the Commerce Department’s administrative review of antidumping duty and countervailing duty orders on Chinese-origin aluminum foil, saying that the department had to reconsider or explain why it refused the review’s exporters a double remedies offset. It said the relevant law requires the department to calculate a subsidy's price impact based on what the price might have been without the subsidy, not on whether prices declined during the review period.
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CIT Judge Claire Kelly sustained Commerce’s selection of Romania as its primary surrogate for the review as based on substantial evidence. The exporters that brought the case, led by mandatory respondent Jiangsu Dingsheng New Materials, were raising only an issue of fact but wrongly asking Kelly to rule “with little or no deference to Commerce,” she said.
Regarding the double remedies offset, she said Commerce had misinterpreted the relevant law, 19 U.S.C. 1677-1(f)(1). The law states that the department may provide a double remedies offset when a countervailable subsidy offered by a non-market economy “has been demonstrated to have reduced the average price of imports ... during the relevant period.” She called the particular phrasing of the law “ambiguous.”
Analyzing it under the Loper Bright ruling, she said that “demonstrated to have reduced the average price of imports ... during the relevant period” could either mean that “during the relevant period prices declined, from one time point within the period to another time point within the period” or that prices declined during the period “from what those prices would have been without the subsidy.”
The first interpretation, she said, “makes no sense.” Commerce uses surrogate values when calculating the normal value of non-market economy products, so interpreting the law as requiring an actual decline in prices over the course of a period would miss that the surrogate’s information wouldn’t be affected by the non-market economy’s subsidy.
The law, she said, “reflects a concern not for a reduction in price from one point in the relevant period to another, but rather for a relative reduction in price as compared to a price that would exist without a subsidy.”
Commerce’s ruling that Dingsheng couldn’t show potential double remedies because the exporter’s prices increased during the review period was therefore inaccurate, she held. She remanded that aspect of the results for reconsideration.
(Jiangsu Dingsheng New Materials Joint-Stock Co. v. U.S., Slip Op. 25-93, CIT # 23-00264, dated 7/21/2025; Judge: Claire Kelly; Attorneys: Ned Marshak of Grunfeld Desiderio for plaintiffs led by Jiangsu Dingsheng New Materials Joint-Stock Co., Ltd.; Christopher Berridge for defendant U.S. government; John Herrmann for defendant-intervenors led by Aluminum Association Trade Enforcement Working Group and its individual members)