The Commerce Department made no changes to its final results of the 2019-20 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on solar cells from China, which was on remand at the Court of International Trade after the court sent back three elements of the review (see 2405090045). The court sent back Commerce's valuation of solar glass using Romanian import prices, valuation of air freight using Freightos data and use of partial adverse facts available against exporter Risen Energy Co. (Jinko Solar Import and Export Co. v. United States, CIT # 22-00219).
Antidumping Surrogate Values
When the Commerce Department conducts an antidumping investigation or review into a product from a non-market economy, it calculates the applicable AD rate by looking to surrogate values from third-party nations, given that the information from the NME producer is tainted by non-market forces. Selecting which companies and nations to use as the primary surrogates is subject to extensive litigation at the Court of International Trade and Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an effort to either raise or lower an exporter's AD rate. Parties will discuss a variety of relevant factors, including the contemporaneity of the data, how similar a third-party company's product is to the product under review and the completeness of the data.
The Commerce Department continued to find that India was the appropriate primary surrogate country in its 16th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on certain frozen fish fillets from Vietnam, it said in remand results filed Nov. 6 at the Court of International Trade (Catfish Farmers of America v. U.S., CIT # 21-00380)
The Commerce Department is set to increase the antidumping duty rate it assigned to Best Mattresses and Rose Lion in an AD investigation on mattresses from Cambodia, it said in a remand redetermination dated July 17. Commerce reopened the record and issued a supplemental questionnaire to the petitioners, asking for further explanation of the process by which they retrieved Emirates Sleep’s financial statements and how the statements constituted publicly available information (Best Mattresses International v. U.S., CIT # 21-00281).
Proposed changes by the Commerce Department to its antidumping and countervailing duty regulations were met with a diverse array of responses from governments, producers, importers, lawyers and others, with particular focus on the agency's proposal to consider intellectual property, human rights and environmental protections in AD/CVD proceedings and proposed changes that would allow particular market situation adjustments to the sales-below-cost test.
The Court of International Trade on June 7 upheld the Commerce Department's classification of the surrogate values for aluminum ash byproduct and rolling oil inputs in the first antidumping duty administrative review on aluminum foil from China, as well as the agency's decision to use Maersk data to calculate surrogate freight costs and its refusal to grant respondent Jiangsu Zhongji Lamination Materials Co. a double remedies adjustment for input subsidies the respondent said were countervailable.
The Commerce Department's proposed new regulations governing antidumping and countervailing duty proceedings would arm the agency with "new tools to address foreign governments’ inaction that benefit foreign producers," global law firm Akin Gump said in an alert this week. For instance, Commerce could consider evidence of a foreign government's weak laws on human and labor rights or environmental and intellectual property protections when picking benchmark data to find the existence and amount of subsidies in countervailing duty proceedings.
The Court of International Trade upheld the Commerce Department's interpretation of the Major Inputs Rule to allow for the use of third-country surrogate data as "information available" for determining the cost of production of a major input a respondent bought from an affiliated non-market economy-based supplier.
The Court of International Trade in a Dec. 22 opinion upheld the Commerce Department's final results in the 2017-2018 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on hardwood plywood from China. In all, Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves looked at the six issues and sided with Commerce: (1) Commerce's calculation of normal value for respondent Linyi Chengen using its normal methodology and not its alternative input methodology; (2) Commerce's surrogate value data and calculation for Linyi Chengen's log inputs; (3) the agency's surrogate value calculation for labor; (4) whether a reply brief from the plaintiffs raises new arguments and has new information; (5) the surrogate value for Linyi Chengen's formaldehyde input; and (6) Commerce's selection of financial statements and calculation of surrogate financial ratios.
The Court of International Trade remanded elements of the Commerce Department's administrative review of the antidumping duty order on frozen fish fillets from Vietnam. In an April 25 opinion made public May 3 submitted in two cases -- one brought by the sole mandatory respondent NTSF Seafoods Joint Stock Co. and the other by Catfish Farmers of America, et al. -- Judge M. Miller Baker sent back parts of the review that deal with Commerce's position over whether Indonesia has a comparable level of economic development to Vietnam, whether the Indian factors of production data are the best available as compared to Indonesia, Commerce's failure to engage with contradicting evidence over NTSF's ratio of whole live fish to fillets and the moisture content of NTSF's fillets.
The Commerce Department's decision to pick Turkey over Mexico as a surrogate country in an antidumping duty investigation was not backed by sufficient evidence, importer List Industries argued in an Oct. 14 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Seeing as the Mexican surrogate company's data was more detailed and that the company was actually profitable, unlike the Turkish company's, Commerce should have gone with the Mexican surrogate company, List said.