In oral arguments March 7, Court of International Trade Judge Timothy Reif heard the government’s and exporters’ arguments in a case regarding an administrative review on multilayered wood flooring from China. The review’s final results were based on the calculated rate of only one respondent after it was discovered selection of the other was based on an error by the Commerce Department (Jiangsu Senmao Bamboo and Wood Industry Co. v. U.S., CIT # 20-03885).

The Court of International Trade in an opinion made public March 8 sent back the Commerce Department's model matching methodology in the antidumping duty investigation on superabsorbent polymers (SAP) from South Korea. Judge Thomas Aquilino said that the agency didn't justify the methodology with sufficient evidence and that it used unverified data from exporter LG Chem while also failing to address evidence from the AD petitioner that the methodology allowed for LG Chem to manipulate its AD margin.

Judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit during a March 7 oral argument prodded various statutory interpretations of U.S. countervailing duty law as it pertains to finding whether demand for a good is "substantially dependent" on an upstream product for purposes of assigning countervailing duties. If substantial dependence is established, Commerce may attribute subsidies to a raw agricultural grower to a later stage producer.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on March 7 said that importer RKW Klerks' net wraps products, used in a machine to bale harvested crops, are not "parts" of harvesting machinery under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Judges Richard Taranto, Raymond Chen and Tiffany Cunningham thus sided with CBP's classification of the products as "warp knit fabric," dutiable at 10% under HTS subheading 6005.39.00.

The Court of International Trade last week ordered a hearing in a countervailing duty injury case on whether any party violated the court's rules regarding the bracketing of confidential information, suggesting that Rule 11 sanctions were on the table.

The Court of International Trade on March 6 sustained the Commerce Department's fourth remand results excluding Star Pipe Products' ductile iron flanges from the antidumping duty order on cast iron pipe fittings from China.

Trade Law Daily is providing readers with the top stories from last week, in case you missed them. All articles can be found by searching on the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

The U.S. on March 4 opposed exporter Chandan Steel Limited's motion for reconsideration of the Court of International Trade's order sustaining the company's adverse facts available rate in the 2018-19 antidumping duty review on stainless steel flanges from India. The government argued that the court properly found it didn't need to resolve certain issues pertaining to Chandan's allocation method for reporting its costs of production and that Chandan failed to show any "manifest error" in the court's decision to sustain the use of AFA based on the exporter's inadequate reporting of comparison market window period sales (Kisaan Die Tech Private, Ltd. v. United States, CIT # 21-00512).

The Court of International Trade in a decision made public March 5 sustained the Commerce Department's use of exporter Nexco's acquisition costs as a proxy for its suppliers' costs of production in the antidumping duty investigation on raw honey from Argentina.

A Canadian-owned company told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an opening brief March 1 that its "internal inventory transfer" from a Canadian warehouse to New York was not a sale for export, and its goods shouldn’t have been liquidated using transaction value with a 75.75% “uplift” (Midwest-CBK, LLC v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 24-1142).