Commerce Extends Wood Flooring Review Decisions to 2020 Administrative Review
The Commerce Department on Sept. 24 again maintained its calculation of an input’s tier two price benchmark and again applied adverse facts available to a mandatory respondent in its new results on remand regarding the 2020 administrative review of the countervailing duty order on Chinese multilayered wood flooring (Baroque Timber Industries (Zhongshan) Co. v. United States, CIT # 23-00136).
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The department reached identical conclusions in the remand results, filed Sept. 19, for the 2019 administrative review (see 2509240059).
As it did in the 2019 review, it maintained its use of a 2020 plywood price benchmark calculated from both UN Comtrade data, which includes sales of all grades of plywood from many countries, and International Tropical Timber Organization data, which only covers sales of less-expensive grade “C” plywood from Brazil and Peru. The department said that the plaintiff, Baroque Timber, was asking to narrow available data to the point that it was excluding relevant prices from the benchmark.
Commerce also said it would again be applying AFA for the Chinese government’s failure to provide documentation demonstrating none of the mandatory respondent’s managing employees were members of the Chinese Communist Party. The foreign government claimed that it couldn’t provide the requested information because the information wasn’t contained in a “central government database.”
The government could have looked to local government or party data, Commerce explained -- it said its request was broadly written and could’ve been fulfilled in a number of ways, not just by turning to a central database.