Parties Challenging Activated Carbon Review Results Say Commerce Made Mathematical Errors
All the parties opposing the results of an antidumping duty review on Chinese activated carbon argued that Commerce failed to correct two mathematical mistakes in its review results despite timely ministerial error allegations (Ningxia Guanghua Cherishmet Activated Carbon Co. v. United States, CIT # 24-00262).
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The parties -- plaintiffs Ningxia Guanghua Cherishmet Activated Carbon (GHC) and Jilin Bright Future Chemicals; consolidated plaintiffs Carbon Activated Tianjin Co. and Carbon Activated Corp.; and plaintiff-intervenors led by Bengbu Modern Environmental Co. -- filed a joint motion for judgment at the Court of International Trade on Aug. 14 arguing that Commerce wrongly refused to accept two ministerial error allegations from Jilin Bright.
They also claimed that the agency wrongly chose Malaysia instead of Romania as a surrogate.
First, Jilin Bright alleged that Commerce erred by subtracting the “loss on disposal of equity instruments” and “fair value loss on equity investments” categories in Malaysian surrogate Century Chemical Works’ financial information from the surrogate’s selling, general and administrative expenses, but not from its total profit, they said.
Commerce claimed those values “[were] not related to the operating cost, but [did] contribute to profitability” for Century, the parties said. But those categories describe losses incurred by Century, they said, and should have been deducted from Century’s profit.
The agency's refusal to accept Jilin’s ministerial error allegation went against “both common accounting principles and Commerce’s own established practice,” they said.
Jilin Bright also alleged Commerce's per-unit VAT tax calculation for the exporter’s dumping margin included a double multiplication error. Commerce should have accepted Jilin’s recommended formula for that calculation, the parties said.
And they again argued that Malaysia was the wrong surrogate country for the review, saying Romania was also a significant producer of activated carbon and had better-quality data. Even if the selection of Malaysia wasn’t arbitrary and capricious, they said, the agency shouldn’t have selected aberrational surrogates for sub-bituminous coal, hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide.
It also shouldn’t have excluded the financial statements of three Malaysian producers from its financial ration calculation, they said, as that meant it wasn’t working with the best available information.
That decision, they said, went against “Commerce’s longstanding preference” of calculating “the average of as many financial statements as possible in order to account for outliers and provide the most representative data.”