Catfish Farmers Files Complaint Challenging 2022-23 Frozen Fish Fillets AD Review
Domestic petitioner Catfish Farmers of America brought another case Aug. 19 against an administrative review of the antidumping duty order on frozen fish fillets from Vietnam -- this time, the review for the 2022-23 period (Catfish Farmers of America v. United States, CIT # 25-00156).
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In March, the petitioner coalition voluntarily dismissed its cases challenging the results of the 2018-19 and 2019-20 AD reviews after the Court of International Trade affirmed the Commerce Department’s use of India as its primary surrogate over Indonesia (see 2503280050 and 2503100059).
In its Aug. 19 complaint, the petitioner said that Commerce wrongly granted all the involved respondents that qualified for a separate rate but were not individually examined the sole mandatory respondent’s zero percent margin in the review final results. Instead, the department should have based the margin for the six separate rate companies “on the $0.18/kg margin assigned to the separate rate companies in the prior administrative review,” it said.
It claimed that the statute prohibits Commerce from granting separate rate respondents the mandatory respondents’ zero percent rate unless all other calculation options are unreasonable.
Further, doing so in this review was actually unreasonable, it said, as the record showed that the separate rate respondents’ operations differed from those of the mandatory respondent. It said the mandatory respondent’s operations “were far larger in scope of activities, vertically and horizontally integrated, and had significantly different financial structures than the separate rate respondents.”