In a March 18 brief supporting a Jan. 24 motion to dismiss (see 2401230040), the U.S. again argued in a case involving the antidumping and countervailing duty pause on Southeast Asian solar panels that the Court of International Trade lacks jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(i) because it “is, or could have been” available under 28 U.S.C. § 1581(c) (Auxin Solar v. U.S., CIT # 23-00274).

The Court of International Trade on March 18 said that the U.S. waited too long to send surety firm Aegis Security Insurance Co. a bill for an unpaid customs bond on Chinese garlic imports that entered in 2004. Judge Stephen Vaden said that the government's eight-year delay in demanding the payment from Aegis "was unreasonable and a breach of contract." The court said the delay broke the "reasonable time requirement" -- an "implied contractual term."

The U.S. told the Court of International Trade in a March 15 reply brief that importer Katana Racing has failed to submit any evidence that would be admissible at trial to rebut the govenrment's claims in a customs penalty suit. The U.S. said Katana only pointed to "hearsay" in addressing the government's arguments that the company was the importer of record for the 386 entries at issue and that the importer negligently entered the goods via "material and false statement" (United States v. Katana Racing, CIT # 19-00125).

CBP is adding an administrative protective order process for companies involved in Enforce and Protect Act investigations to access business confidential information of other "interested parties," so the companies can have full access to CBP's decision-making in a duty evasion investigation, the agency said.

The U.S. on March 13 opposed importer Unichem Enterprises' motion to expedite its customs case on CBP's exclusion of its entries of 7-keto dehydroepiandrosterone, saying the company "has failed to establish good cause for expediting this action" (Unichem Enterprises v. U.S., CIT # 24-00033).

The Court of International Trade will ask parties in an oral argument in Section 1581(i) action set for March 20 if antidumping and countervailing duties can ever violate the 8th Amendment as an excessive fine if they are legally calculated. Issuing questions ahead of the argument, Judge Mark Barnett also asked about when exactly importer Greentech Energy Solutions was injured when its solar cell entries were assessed AD/CVD (Greentech Energy Solutions v. United States, CIT # 23-00118).

The Commerce Department on March 12 reluctantly conducted a pass-through analysis to show, by court order, that a remedy wasn't being redundantly applied by both AD and CVD orders on biodiesel from Indonesia due to a government subsidy that lowered the cost of an input (Wilmar Trading PTE Ltd. v. U.S., CIT # 18-00121).

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The Court of International Trade on March 11 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results excluding importer Crane Resistoflex's ductile iron lap joint flanges from the antidumping duty order on pipe fittings from China. Judge Timothy Stanceu upheld the decision as now being in a form the court could sustain, after previously finding it to not be, and as being backed by substantial evidence due to the agency's consideration of a host of (k)(1) factors.

Ford Motor Company agreed to pay $365 million to settle allegations that it knowingly undervalued hundreds of thousands of cargo vans, DOJ announced. The settlement comes five years after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that CBP properly classified Ford's Transit Connect vehicles as cargo vans, dutiable at 25%, and not as passenger vans, dutiable at 2.5%.