CIT Remands 2021 Turkish Rebar CVD Review, Says Commerce Relied on Information It Rejected to Apply AFA
Court of International Trade Judge Gary Katzmann remanded Oct. 6 parts of the Commerce Department’s 2021 review of the countervailing duty order on steel rebar from Turkey, asking the department to rework its application of adverse facts available to Kaptan Demir’s use of a social security benefits law, Turkish Law 27256. He agreed the department had based its decision solely on information it had declined to add to the record.
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He also remanded Commerce’s rejection of a land price benchmark report prepared by Kaptan, saying the department didn’t adequately explain it, and its de jure specificity determination regarding a tax exemption program. He sustained the department’s decision to apply AFA to another social security benefits law, Turkish Law 4447, saying that Kaptan had failed to exhaust its arguments to the contrary.
First, Katzmann said that Commerce’s use of AFA for Turkish Law 27256 was unsupported by record evidence; the department only determined that there was a gap in the record based on information it had rejected, the judge noted.
Specifically, Kaptan tried twice to submit letters describing the benefits it received under the law to Commerce (see 2411210044), he said. That was the first time the department had heard of the law during the review. Commerce rejected both for untimeliness, but it said that Kaptan had failed to report the benefits before and thus caused “necessary information to be absent from the record” (see 2502260064).
When Kaptan argued that Commerce’s own regulations “preclude it from making ‘any determination’ using ‘factual information, written argument, or other material that the Secretary rejects,’” the department rebutted that it was relying on its own rejection memos to Kaptan’s letters, not the letters themselves.
Katzmann disagreed. He said that any of the references to the law in Commerce’s own communication was “derived from the information that Commerce rejected,” meaning the department had violated its own regulations.
Finding otherwise would mean letting Commerce “preserve information about the existence of Turkish Law 27256 in its own documents, while rejecting information about the extent of Kaptan’s benefits,” he said. He agreed with Kaptan that “[e]ither the submission is rejected or it is not; the regulation gives no middle ground.”
Regarding the department’s refusal to consider Kaptan’s land price benchmark report, Katzmann said Commerce’s response -- identical to the one offered in its results of its 2020 review (see 2410210019) -- failed to address “Kaptan’s colorable concern” about the way the actual report used conducted geographical sampling.
He also remanded the department’s finding that the Turkish Bank and Insurance Transactions Tax exemption was de jure specific to Kaptan. Again, he cited the previous court regarding the 2020 review, which remanded the finding for Commerce’s failure to show that the program wasn’t available to a broad group of companies.
On the other hand, he found that Kaptan had failed to exhaust its arguments regarding its receipt of adverse facts available for use of Turkish Law 4447.
Explaining that the “precise contours of Turkish Law 4447 are not clear from the record,” but that it appears “to be an umbrella law that implements at least two social security programs,” he said Kaptan’s administrative briefing had made only a passing reference to the law. The exporter only included “a general statement that ‘Commerce’s stated rationale for resorting to facts available ... [is] in error,’” he said, whereas it tried to raise two distinct arguments about the issue in its later submissions.
(Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret v. United States, Slip Op. 25-131, CIT # 24-00096, dated 10/06/25; Judge: Gary Katzmann; Attorneys: David Simon of Law Office of David Simon for plaintiff Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret; Collin Matthias for defendant U.S. government; Maureen Thorson of Wiley Rein for defendant-intervenor Rebar Trade Action Coalition)