China is the country of origin for Lexmark printers imported from Mexico for both Section 301 trade duties and country of origin marking, CBP said in a recently released ruling. CBP found that the printer transports incorporated into the printer, which were made in China, were critical for the printer to feed the paper and to print copies, and were the component that imparted essential character, rather than the printed circuit board assemblies, which were assembled in Mexico.
The Commerce Department didn't violate statutory, regulatory or constitutional considerations in instructing CBP to automatically liquidate exporter Goodluck India's cold-drawn mechanical tubing shipments as part of the third antidumping review without providing the company with a later chance to file a request for review, the Court of International Trade ruled. The court originally excluded Goodluck's entries from the AD order, but that ruling was reversed on appeal. Commerce told CBP to liquidate Goodluck's entries subject to the AD order's third review at the 33.7% rate instead of the provisional zero percent rate in place during the second AD review's anniversary month.
The Court of International Trade in a Nov. 20 opinion granted the motion from a group of Canadian exporters to reinstate their exclusion from the countervailing duty order on softwood lumber from Canada after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a CIT ruling that overturned an expedited review that excluded them from the duties. The court also made the exclusion of the exporters effective back to August 2021, when the companies were first subjected to the order.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
Medicinal products used in animal feeds are properly classified as "antibiotics" under Harmonized Tariff Schedule heading 2941 rather than as "animal feeds" under HTS heading 2309, CBP headquarters said in a recently released ruling.
The scope of the antidumping duty order on carbon steel butt-weld pipe fittings from China "unambiguously" applies to pipe fittings "in finished and unfinished form," AD petitioners Tube Forgings of America and Mills Iron Works argued in a Nov. 16 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Commerce's determination "eviscerates" the order's remedial effect by interpreting the term "unfinished form" to mean "create subcategories of pipe fittings in unfinished form," then saying these subcategories excluded certain pipe fittings in unfinished form, the brief said (Tube Forgings of America v. U.S., CIT # 23-00236).
The Commerce Department cannot make the contradictory finding that the process of assembly or completion of solar cells in Cambodia was insignificant, while simultaneously saying these processes, involving the formation of a positive-negative junction on a polysilicon wafer, give the solar cells their essential character, exporter BYD HK Co. said in a Nov. 16 complaint at the Court of International Trade (BYD (H.K.) Co. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00221).
The Commerce Department imposed an "onerous level of certification" on countervailing duty respondent Risen Energy Co. regarding its supposed use of China's Export Buyer's Credit Program, the Court of International Trade ruled in a Nov. 17 opinion. Judge Jane Restani said that all the factors considered together, which included the provision of non-use certificates from Risen's U.S. buyers and government intrusion into these companies' financial records regarding years-old transactions, resulted in an "unnecessary level of verification."
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Nov. 14 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
CBP announced an Enforce and Protect Act (EAPA) investigation on whether Texas United Chemical Company and TBC-Brinadd evaded an antidumping duty order on xanthan gum from China. The agency said it found reasonable suspicion existed that the importers had transshipped Chinese-origin xanthan gum through Turkey, necessitating the imposition of interim measures.