The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York should issue an injunction against One Banana North America Corp. from seeking arbitration in New York over claims that cargo company MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. damaged banana shipments, MSC said in a June 27 complaint. The shipping company said that the terms of the contract between MSC and One Banana clearly stipulate that cargo claims can only be litigated before the Southern District of New York (MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. v. One Banana North America Corp., S.D.N.Y. #22-05425).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its mandate on June 28 in a countervailing duty case over Indian exporter Uttam Galva's failure to report an affiliated cross-owned company. In a May opinion, the Federal Circuit said that the Commerce Department properly used adverse facts available, resulting in a 588.43% CVD rate, over the failure to report the affiliate in the CVD review on corrosion-resistant steel products from India. The court said the exporter didn't show that the affiliated company's financial statement could rebut the inclusion of 20 subsidy programs supposedly given to it, permitting the subsidies' inclusion in Uttam Galva's rate (Uttam Galva Steels Limited v. United States, Fed. Cir. #21-2119).
The Court of International Trade in a June 28 order consolidated four antidumping duty cases concerning whether the Commerce Department can use one antidumping mandatory respondent's third-country sales to calculate another mandatory respondent's constructed value profit, selling expenses and constructed export price profit. The cases, brought by lead plaintiffs Hyundai Steel Co., AJU Besteel Co., Nexteel Co. and Husteel Co., all challenge the same final results in the administrative review of the antidumping duty order on oil country tubular goods from South Korea.
The Office of U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts dropped its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case against Richard Boncy, a businessman and former Haitian ambassador-at-large, and Joseph Baptiste, a Haitian-American businessman. Filing a motion to dismiss a few days before the case's second trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the U.S. said that given the court's earlier decision vacating past convictions and the loss of recordings potentially containing exculpatory information, the case should be tossed. Judge Allison Burroughs dismissed the case in a text-only order June 28 (U.S. v. Roger Richard Boncy, D. Mass. #17-10305).
Antidumping duty petitioner Wheatland Tube Co. wants one of its appeals of an antidumping duty case over whether the Commerce Department can make a particular market situation adjustment to the sales-below-cost test dismissed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but says one other appeal should be kept alive. Filing a motion for voluntary dismissal, Wheatland said that its case was held in abeyance pending an appeal of the key case, Hyundai Steel Co v. U.S., to the Supreme Court, in which the Federal Circuit said that Commerce cannot make a PMS adjustment to the sales-below-cost test (see 2112100039). Since no writ of certiorari was filed to the nation's highest court by Wheatland in the Hyundai Steel case, the court should toss the present appeal, the petitioner argued.
Importer Prime Time Commerce failed to exhaust its administrative remedies for its argument that the Commerce Department should look to confidential information to provide "gap-filling" data needed to calculate a rate separate from the China-wide dumping margin for the importer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a June 28 opinion. Sustaining the Court of International Trade, Judges Alan Lourie, Haldane Mayer and Tiffany Cunningham also ruled that while CIT and Commerce erred in not accepting Prime Time's submissions since it is an "interested party," the error was a harmless one.
Marlon Moody, a former employee at cargo handling company Alliance Ground International, was sentenced to one year in prison for stealing four gold bars that were being shipped from Australia to New York, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California announced. In April 2020, employees of Alliance, which provides ground handling services at Los Angeles International Airport, were tasked with offloading and securing a shipment of gold bars that were stopping in L.A. en route to New York. The shipment -- a collection of 2,000 gold bars each valued at around $56,000 --- arrived via Singapore Airlines at the direction of a Canadian bank.
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit should grant exporter Borusan Mannesmann's motion for summary affirmance in its case over whether the Commerce Department can make a particular market situation adjustment to the sales-below-cost test, Borusan argued in a June 24 letter. Since the appellate court held Borusan's case in abeyance pending a petition for writ of certiorari from the court's decision in Hyundai Steel Co. v. U.S. and no such petition was filed, the court should grant the affirmance motion, the brief said (Borusan Mannesmann Boru Sanayi ve Ticaret v. United States, Fed. Cir. #22-1502).
The Court of International Trade has the authority to order the Labor Department to certify that former AT&T call center employees are eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance benefits, the former employees said in a June 23 brief. Responding to the court's request for further briefing on the issue of the court's authority, the plaintiffs said that the statutory text, purpose, history and practice all reveal that the court has doled out similar relief in the past and that the trade court can indeed issue the posited relief despite the lack of a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Former Employees of AT&T Services, Through Communications Workers of America Local 4123 v. United States, CIT #20-00075).