Minor issues in reporting home market sales in an antidumping duty administrative review don’t rise to the level that would justify an adverse facts available margin for an exporter’s large power transformers from South Korea, and the exporter’s purported lack of cooperation in a previous year’s administrative review does not give Commerce leeway to apply AFA anyway, said the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an Aug. 11 decision. Affirming a decision of the Court of International Trade, the Federal Circuit upheld the lower court’s finding that the errors in a small subset of Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems’s reported home market sales “were inadvertent and were corrected without undue difficulty,” and should not have served as the basis for the 60.81% AFA rate originally assigned by Commerce. On remand, Commerce had dropped its reliance on AFA and calculated a zero percent AD duty rate. Hitachi, petitioner in the case, had appealed.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Court of International Trade will close out a controversial case involving allegations of antidumping and countervailing duty evasion by a Dominican exporter in that Dominican exporter’s favor, granting on Aug. 8 a motion to enter judgment sustaining CBP’s reversal of an evasion finding for Kingtom Aluminio in an Enforce and Protect Act investigation. Kingtom, several importers and the U.S. government had filed a joint motion requesting CBP’s remand results be sustained (see 2206230037).
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Aug. 5 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 affirmed a February determination that found substantial evidence of evasion of countervailing duties and antidumping duties on wooden cabinets from China by two importers, after a review of the case, according to a recently released notice.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
Court of International Trade Judge Leo Gordon ruled against importer Cyber Power Systems in four motions -- two from Cyber Power, and two from the government -- in a case regarding the country of origin of imported surgery protectors (Cyber Power Systems v. U.S., CIT #20-00124).
The Commerce Department cannot deduct Section 232 national security duties from antidumping duty respondent Borusan Mannesman's U.S. price because the duties are remedial, temporary and deducting them would count as a double remedy, making them unlike normal customs duties, the respondent argued. Filing a reply brief Aug. 4 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the respondent said Commerce failed to conduct a "fulsome analysis" of whether the Section 232 duties are more like normal customs duties or to special duties, like Section 201 safeguards, and instead "confined its analysis" to finding distinctions between Section 232 and Section 201 duties. The agency also failed to acknowledge the "legal and constitutional distinction between regular duties imposed by Congress" and special duties imposed by the president (Borusan Mannesmann Boru Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. #21-2097).
The Court of International Trade in an Aug. 4 order denied defendant Greenlight Organic and Parambir Singh Aulakh's motion for summary judgment over the date that the U.S. discovered customs fraud for the purpose of finding whether the statute of limitations had run out. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves ruled that the undisputed facts don't back any of three dates floated by the defendants as the date that the U.S. first received evidence of Greenlight's double invoicing scheme. In the scheme, Greenlight is accused of fraudulently misclassifying its Vietnam-origin knit garments.