The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's finding that Al Ghurair Iron & Steel (AGIS) circumvented the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on corrosion-resistant steel products (CORE) from China via the United Arab Emirates, in a Sept. 24 ruling made public on Oct. 4.
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 should have picked Indonesia over India when selecting a surrogate country in an antidumping duty administrative review on frozen fish fillets from Vietnam, Catfish Farmers of America said in an Aug. 30 complaint filed at the Court of International Trade. Commerce picked India in spite of the fact that Indonesia "produces identical and comparable merchandise that more closely represents the subject merchandise than does India, Indonesia produces and exports far greater quantities than India, and the Indonesian data on the record are superior to the Indian data," the complaint said (Catfish Farmers of Ameirca, et al. v. United States, CIT #21-00380).