The Court of International Trade in a decision made public Jan. 29 sustained in part and remanded in part the expedited countervailing duty investigation of softwood lumber products from Canada. Judge Mark Barnett sent back the Commerce Department's subsidy calculation for affiliated exporters Les Produits Forestiers D&G and Les Produits Forestiers Portbec, which the agency used to account for the differences in volumes of lumber the two companies bought from unaffiliated producers. Barnett then upheld Commerce's use of exporter Fontaine's FY 2015 tax returns to calculate the amount of the tax benefits received by the company -- a move no party contested.

The Court of International Trade on Jan. 28 sustained the Commerce Department's second remand results in a case on the antidumping duty investigation on wind towers from Spain, in which the agency gave the collapsed entity of Siemens Gamesa and Windar a 28.55% AD rate. Judge Timothy Stanceu said Commerce reasonably found holding company Siemens Gamesa to be a "producer or exporter" and appropriately decided to collapse Siemens Gamesa, Windar and five of Windar's subsidiaries. The judge also upheld the agency's calculation of the collapsed entity's constructed export price.

The Court of International Trade on Jan. 25 sustained the Commerce Department's decision to cut the antidumping duty rate for exporter Apiario Diamante Comercial Exportadora, known as Supermel, from 83.72% to 10.52% in the AD investigation on raw honey from Brazil. Judge Timothy Stanceu rejected a host of claims against the move from the petitioners, finding that Commerce adequately surveyed the record and said total adverse facts available wasn't warranted due to the reliability of Supermel's data. The petitioners failed to "perfect" their claims alleging deficiencies in the respondent's submissions, since "they make no attempt to show" how the deficiencies "affected the Department's margin calculation," the court said.

The Court of International Trade ordered Jan. 27 the remand of a circumvention inquiry in which an exporter, Hoa Phat Steel Pipe, failed to meet a deadline but still submitted all requested information before the opening of the first business day following that deadline. CIT Judge Timothy Reif found the Commerce Department’s rejection of that information, and subsequent assignment of adverse facts available to the exporter, was an abuse of discretion, specifically noting that Commerce itself had twice extended the deadline for its own determination (Hoa Phat Steel Pipe Co. v. United States, CIT # 23-00248).

The Court of International Trade on Jan. 22 largely dismissed importer Prysmian Cables and Systems USA's suit challenging the Commerce Department's denial of its Section 232 steel and aluminum tariff exclusion requests. Judge Stephen Vaden said the company's claims that Commerce failed to act since it didn't perform three required actions for each denial fall short, since the agency didn't fail to act. A denial isn't an "action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed: It is a decision," the court said. The court also dismissed most of Prysmian's challenges to the denials as being arbitrary and capricious, finding them to have been brought beyond the applicable two-year statute of limitations for challenging Section 232 exclusion request denials.

The Commerce Department appropriately declined to countervail three debt-to-equity swaps received by exporter KG Dongbu Steel in the 2019 CVD review of corrosion-resistant steel products from South Korea, the Court of International Trade held on Jan. 17. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves said the evidence doesn't support a finding that the government pressured nongovernmental institutions to take part in the company's debt restructuring. The court also upheld Commerce's reconsideration of its calculation of the "uncreditworthy benchmark rate" and "unequityworthy discount rate," given that no party contested the marks.

The Court of International Trade in a pair of cases held that the Commerce Department permissibly found the full allotment of emissions credits under a Korean cap-and-trade program to be de jure specific. Judge M. Miller Baker sustained the 2019 countervailing duty review on cut-to-length carbon-quality steel plate from South Korea, finding that the criteria for the program's eligibility, which are international trade intensity and high production costs, are "neutral" and don't favor one enterprise or industry over another.

The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's use of exporter Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret's invoice date as the date of sale as opposed to the contract date in the 2021-22 review of the antidumping duty order on steel concrete rebar from Turkey. Judge Jane Restani also upheld Commerce's differences-in-merchandise adjustment calculation, which accounted for inflation. The judge said the calculation wasn't "distortive" as Kaptan claimed, and, in fact, could have actually been distortive had it not accounted for inflation.

The Court of International Trade on Jan. 15 sustained the Commerce Department's decision to deny exporters Hyundai Steel Co. and Husteel Co.'s constructed export price offsets in the 2019-20 review of the antidumping duty order on circular welded non-alloy steel pipe from South Korea. Judge Timothy Reif said that Commerce reasonably said a "per-unit analysis" was needed to properly assess whether the home market and CEP sales were made at a more advanced stage of distribution and that neither respondent submitted such an analysis. The judge also said Hyundai received adequate notice of any insufficiencies in its submissions.

The Court of International Trade in a decision made public Jan. 10 sustained the Commerce Department's antidumping duty investigation into pentafluoroethane (R-125) from China. Judge Richard Eaton said Commerce properly decided to use a direct valuation of an intermediate input of R-125 instead of using a valuation of the upstream raw materials. The judge also said the agency appropriately denied various byproduct offsets claimed by exporter Zhejiang Sanmei Chemical Ind. Co. and permissibly calculated the exporter's surrogate freight rate by taking a simple average of short- and long-haul Russian freight data.