Importer Says It Shouldn't Have Received AFA for Exporter's Failure to Cooperate
The Commerce Department was wrong to hit importer AM Stone with adverse facts available during antidumping duty and countervailing duty reviews on Chinese-origin quartz surface products for its exporter’s failure to provide information, AM Stone said in a July 27 brief. Despite Commerce's claim otherwise, substantial evidence shows the quartz countertops were manufactured in Malaysia, not China, AM Stone said, arguing that it shouldn’t have been assigned the China-wide 326.15% AD rate and 45.32% CVD rate (AM Stone & Cabinets v. U.S., CIT # 24-00241).
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Commerce justified AFA by claiming that “certain information was not supplied,” but AM Stone provided all the information it could, the importer said. It said the information Commerce sought was held instead by AM Stone’s exporter, Universal Quartz.
The missing information cited by Commerce included, for example, the “exporter’s corporate structure, accounting and financial practices, an inventory movement schedule related to quartz slab purchases, as well as documentation related to the production of a U.S. entry,” it said. “There is no evidence that plaintiff, the unrelated importer, would have access to such information.”
Commerce couldn’t find that it didn’t participate in the reviews to the best of its ability, the importer argued. It described AFA as “a very serious step which should not be taken lightly.”
The importer also argued that the missing information wasn’t relevant to its own imported products. It said it had provided adequate evidence that the items it imported were manufactured in Malaysia, including “[c]lear and undisputed photographs” of its exporter’s Malaysian factory and production processes. Because of that, “a significant portion of the information not provided is ultimately not relevant to the issue as to production of a specific entry,” it said.