The U.K. added a general license under its Russia and Belarus sanctions regime allowing legal service providers to receive and send payments to and from or on behalf of a sanctioned party. Sanctioned parties are likewise allowed to "pay professional legal fees, Counsel's fees, and/or Expenses to a Law Firm, a Legal Adviser, Counsel or a provider of Expenses for Legal Services which have been provided to that" sanctioned party. The legal fees may not exceed 1 million British pounds "per Law Firm" for the duration of the license, which ends Oct. 28.
Kitchenware retailer Williams-Sonoma agreed to pay $3.2 million in civil penalties and "stop making false and misleading claims about the origins of its products," settling a lawsuit brought in a California court, DOJ announced. The agency alleged that Williams-Sonoma violated a Federal Trade Commission administrative order barring the company from advertising wholly imported goods and goods containing "significant imported content" as being "Made in the USA" (U.S. v. Williams-Sonoma, N.D. Cal. # 24-02396).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on April 29 issued its mandate in a case on the tariff classification of importer RKW Klerks' net wrap products, used in a machine to bale harvested crops. In March, the court said the products are not "parts" of harvesting machinery but in fact are "warp knit fabric," dutiable at 10% under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 6005.39.00 (see 2403070047). The court clarified that when an item is "consumable," such as "bullets in a gun, staples in a stapler, or film in a camera," it's not meant solely for use within the machine just because it's used exclusively by the machine. Here, the net wrap is similarly "never a part of the baling machine" since the output product is the net wrap packaged around a hay bale (RKW Klerks v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1210).
The Supreme Court on April 29 turned down the chance to review a lawsuit on whether defunct Lebanese bank Jammal Trust Bank is immune from being sued for supporting Hezbollah as an "instrumentality of a foreign state" under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The question posed by the writ of certiorari was whether a defendant's status as an "instrumentality of a foreign state" kicks in at the time of the filing of the complaint against the company, as the high court held in Dole Food Co. v. Patrickson, or at any time after the suit is filed, as found by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Jammal Trust Bank claimed it became an instrumentality of Lebanon after it was sued when it "entered state-supervised liquidation" (Bartlett v. Baasiri, Sup. Ct. # 23-568).
Importer Diamond Tools Technology will appeal the Court of International Trade's rejection of the company's request for attorney's fees in its challenge to CBP's determination that Diamond Tools Technology evaded the antidumping duty order on diamond sawblades from China. In March, Judge Timothy Reif said that since the case offered two issues of "first impression," the government's position was "substantially justified" for purposes of not awarding attorney's fees to the importer (Diamond Tools Technology v. United States, CIT # 20-00060).
The Court of International Trade in an April 19 decision made public April 29 sent back for the third time the Commerce Department's decision not to investigate the sale of off-peak electricity in South Korea for less than adequate remuneration. Judge Mark Barnett said that Commerce failed to explain why evidence submitted by petitioner Nucor Corp. was insufficient "pursuant to the low standard" for opening a subsidy investigation established in RZBC Group Shareholding Co. v. U.S.
The World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body met on April 26 and was introduced to the new facilitator of the dispute settlement reform talks: Mauritius's Usha Dwarka-Canabady, the WTO announced. The chair of the DSB, Norway's Petter Olberg, said that Dwarka-Canabady accepted the role on April 18 after the "convenor" of the reform process left.
The European Commission and Canada on April 26 proposed new rules to help small and medium-sized enterprises take advantage of the investment dispute resolution mechanism under the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, the commission's Directorate-General for Trade announced.
Chinese nationals Han Li and Lin Chen were charged for their role in a conspiracy to illegally export controlled U.S. technology to Chinese end users, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and Export Administration Regulations, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California announced.
The U.S. and petitioner Nucor Corp. defended the Commerce Department's use of partial adverse facts available against exporter Salzgitter Flachstahl in the antidumping duty investigation on carbon and alloy steel cut-to-length plate from Germany, in a pair of reply briefs at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The government said the steel company said Commerce properly identified a gap in the record stemming from Salzgitter's failure to submit manufacturer information for 28,000 of its sales from an affiliated reseller, Salzgitter Mannesmann Stahlhandel (AG der Dillinger Huttenwerke v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 24-1219).