Israel Citing Wrong Standard for Injury Investigations, ITC, Petitioner Claim
The International Trade Commission and a petitioner each argued that the ITC hadn’t been required to consider the impact of the conflict in Gaza on its affirmative injury finding regarding Israeli brass rod (Government of Israel v. United States, CIT # 24-00197).
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In briefs filed Aug. 15 and Sept. 2, the ITC and petitioner American Brass Rod Fair Trade Coalition said the Israeli government, which brought the case, was asking the commission to consider evidence from outside the period of inquiry.
“The [Israeli government] is simply wrong, as there is no statutory requirement that the Commission consider such post-POI information in rendering material injury determinations,” the petitioner said.
Both the petitioner and the ITC agreed that the Hamas attack had been relevant, but they said that it was relevant “for a proper threat analysis” -- not for a material injury determination.
American Brass Rod said Israel was citing to the regulations governing sunset reviews to argue that the ITC couldn’t “end its analysis at the end of the POI.” Sunset reviews, it said, are prospective analyses “of whether revocation of an order would be likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of material injury within a reasonably foreseeable time.” They aren’t the same as material injury determinations, it said.
The petitioner and the ITC also said that the injury determination was reasonably based on a finding that the volume of brass rod from Israel was significant compared with U.S. consumption. They also said that, despite the Israeli government’s claim otherwise, the ITC doesn’t have to first set a minimum threshold for import volume to find it significant.
Israel argued in its own brief that its import volume was “small,” claiming the ITC “read the word ‘significant’ out of the statute” (see 2505140043). It also claimed that the determination ignored prior decisions that reached an opposite conclusion on similar facts.
But each decision the ITC makes is based on its own record, the commission and the petitioner said. Further, the main prior determination Israel cited, which involved Israeli pipe fitting imports in 1995, was made under “very different” competition conditions, they said.
And though Israel argued that the ITC improperly adjusted domestic industry prices by failing to include buyback “discounts” -- saying that two coalition members would buy back “a significant majority” of the scrap its customers produced while manufacturing other products -- the commission reasonably declined to use the “flawed” methodology, they said.
In fact, they said, Finkelstein, the Israeli brass rod producer, itself had proposed the methodology the ITC used to define prices in both Israel and the United States. It asked the commission to categorize imports as either brass rod sold through scrap buyback programs to end users; rod otherwise sold to end users; or rod sold to distributors.
That still resulted in a finding that Israeli imports were underselling, they said.