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.

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Plaintiffs in a countervailing duty case railed against the Commerce Department's reliance on adverse facts available over the CVD respondents' alleged use of China's Export Buyer's Credit Program, filing a series of four separate briefs at the Court of International Trade. The plaintiffs, led by nonselected respondent Evolutions Flooring, argued that the use of AFA over the EBCP has been "consistently rejected under almost identical factual circumstances," and that Commerce was able to verify non-use of the program without certain information in a different CVD case (Evolutions Flooring v. United States, CIT #21-00591).

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).

The Court of International Trade in a June 24 opinion denied plaintiff Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps' move to amend its complaint in an Enforce and Protect Act evasion case to explicitly contest CBP's denial of its protests over the xanthan gum entries subject to the EAPA decision. Judge Gary Katzmann said that the motion was clearly untimely and futile, and found that the delay in filing the amended complaint was undue and that the plaintiff still fails to identify the protests it is contesting.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska allowed logistics company Lineage Logistics Holding to file a second amicus brief in a case over Jones Act penalties in light of the U.S.'s motion to dissolve the injunction that bars CBP from issuing new Jones Act penalties. Lineage Logistics filed the brief to back plaintiffs Kloosterboer International Forwarding (KIF) and Alaska Reefer Management (ARM) in opposing the move, arguing that the grounds for the injunction remain in place in that the government has yet to comply with the law to provide adequate notice and comment related to its treatment of the Bayside Canadian Rail line for the purposes of granting an exception to the Jones Act (Kloosterboer International Forwarding v. United States, D. Alaska # 3:21-00198).

The U.S., in an amended complaint, continues to fail to show that importer Crown Cork & Seal (CCS) committed fraud or gross negligence over misclassified metal lid imports, the importer argued in a June 22 motion to dismiss at the Court of International Trade. Seeking again to have the trade court toss the U.S.'s first two counts in the case, CCS said the amended complaint doesn't provide any new facts that can revive the two counts which Judge M. Miller Baker already dismissed (U.S. v. Crown Cork & Seal, CIT #21-00361).

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has 32 extra days, until Aug. 1, to file its lists 3 and 4A tariff remand results in the Section 301 litigation, a three-judge panel at the Court of International Trade said in a June 22 order. DOJ, on USTR’s behalf, asked for a 60-day extension to Aug. 30 to fix its Administrative Procedure Act violations, citing the volume of work required to meet the remand order, plus the agency’s limited staff resources and the additional projects compounding its workload (see 2206210042).

Richard Boncy, a businessman and former Haitian ambassador-at-large charged in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bribery scheme, moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that the U.S. destroyed potentially exculpatory evidence. Filing the motion in the Massachusetts U.S. District Court, Boncy, joined by co-defendant and Haitian-American businessman Joseph Baptiste, said that the government's move to destroy the evidence -- a disk allegedly containing recordings of two calls with an undercover FBI agent -- "severely abrogates Mr. Boncy's constitutional rights" (United States v. Roger Richard Boncy, D. Mass. #17-10305).