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."
CBP CROSS Rulings
CBP issues binding advance rulings in connection with the importation of merchandise into the United States. They issue the rulings to give the trade community transparency of how CBP will treat a prospective import or carrier transaction. Common rulings include the tariff classification, country of origin, or free trade agreement applicability of merchandise, among other things. These rulings are available in CBP's Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) database.
A listing of recent Commerce Department antidumping and countervailing duty messages posted on CBP's website March 14, along with the case number(s) and CBP message number, is provided below. The messages are available by searching for the listed CBP message number at CBP's ADCVD Search page.
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.
CBP ruled that the fallback method was appropriate for appraising several pharmaceutical products being imported for use in clinical trials. The ruling, dated Feb. 28, looked at three different valuation scenarios, each for pharmaceutical products that were provided to the importer conducting the clinical trial by related companies but were not actually sold.
CBP has released its March 13 Customs Bulletin (Vol. 58, No. 10). While it contains a recent court decision, no customs rulings are included.
A listing of recent Commerce Department antidumping and countervailing duty messages posted on CBP's website March 11, along with the case number(s) and CBP message number, is provided below. The messages are available by searching for the listed CBP message number at CBP's ADCVD Search page.
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
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%.
The Commerce Department is amending the final results of an antidumping duty administrative review on steel nails from Oman (A-523-808) based on the final decision in a court case challenging those final results.
International Trade Commissioners grappled with how they should fulfill the administration's request for a report on the export competitiveness of the Bangladeshi, Indian, Cambodian, Indonesian and Pakistani apparel sectors over the last 11 years -- is it to uncover how those countries' successes could offer lessons to other developing countries that want to industrialize? Is the success of Bangladesh, which is near to crossing the threshold into a middle-income country largely on the strength of its garment sector, a country with an "unnatural and unfair advantage," because of its suppression of unions and wages, as the AFL-CIO's Eric Gottwald asserted?