A lawsuit at the Court of International Trade filed by an individual who failed their customs broker license test was assigned to Judge Mark Barnett, in a Feb. 17 order. The case was filed by Shuzhen Zhong (see 220211002) without an attorney and requests a review of the six questions that Zhong appealed to CBP in the test. Zhong took particular issue with CBP's getting both her address and gender wrong when returning the results of her appeal. While no attorney is listed for Zhong, Luke Mathers of the Justice Department's International Trade Field Office appeared for the government (Shuzhen Zhong v. United States, CIT #22-00041).
Products from importer SMA Surfaces meet all four of the criteria for an exclusion from the antidumping and countervailing duties on quartz surface products from China, and the Commerce Department never addressed "unrefuted evidence" which shows that one of its products satisfies the key fourth criteria for this exclusion, the importer argued in a Feb. 16 brief at the Court of International Trade (SMA Surfaces v. United States, CIT #21-00399).
The Court of International Trade upheld on Feb. 18 the Commerce Department's remand results in a case over the countervailing duty order on aluminum extrusions from China brought by plaintiffs led by Taizhou United Imp. & Exp. Co. After an initial remand, the court said that Commerce properly countervailed subsided glass. The plaintiffs argued that Commerce couldn't countervail glass inputs sold for less than adequate remuneration since the glass was tied to non-subject merchandise. Judge Leo Gordon said that the plaintiffs pointed out nothing in the record to prove this fact, thus backing Commerce's position.
The U.S. Court of International Trade should deny the Department of Justice's motion to add a November 2018 investigatory “update” report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to the administrative record in the Section 301 litigation (see 2202160033) because the government has failed to show that USTR “actually relied on or considered” the report when it was deciding to impose either the Lists 3 or List 4A tariffs on Chinese imports, Akin Gump lawyers for sample-case plaintiffs HMTX Industries and Jasco Products said in a partial opposition brief filed Feb. 16.
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed an antidumping case brought by Vietnamese exporter Godaco Seafood Joint Stock Co. following the company's motion to voluntarily dismiss the case. Godaco was appealing a Court of International Trade decision affirming the Commerce Department's results of the 2015-16 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on fish fillets from Vietnam, in which the court initially rejected the agency's separate rate calculation. Commerce originally calculated the separate rate by averaging the separate rates from the previous four administrative reviews. The court then upheld the calculation after the agency based the separate rate on more contemporaneous data (see 2109270035). No reason was given for the requested dismissal (Godaco Seafood Joint Stock Company v. U.S., Fed. Cir. #22-1202).
Both CBP's Trade Remedy Law Enforcement Directorate and its Office of Regulation and Rulings failed to make a factual finding when it said that importers Global Aluminum Distributor and Hialeah Aluminum Supply evaded the antidumping duty and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China, the importers and Dominican producer Kingtom Aluminio said. In two motions for judgment at the Court of International Trade, the plaintiffs and Kingtom both argued that CBP skirted the evidentiary standard, instead basing its conclusion on a vague reference to Kingtom's ties to China and discrepancies between the importers' and Kingtom's records (Global Aluminum Distributor v. United States, CIT Consol. #21-00198).
The Department of Justice wants the U.S. Court of International Trade to include two documents that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative “realized” were missing from the administrative record filed April 30 by the government in the Section 301 litigation, it said in a Feb. 15 motion to correct the record. USTR Assistant General Counsel Megan Grimball said in a declaration that the documents were “inadvertently omitted.” DOJ said USTR discovered the omissions in the two weeks since the Feb. 1 oral argument.
The Commerce Department abused its discretion by rejecting filings in antidumping duty and countervailing duty investigations that were submitted 21 and 87 minutes late, respectively, the Court of International Trade said in a pair of Feb. 15 decisions. Commerce's denials of the questionnaire responses from a Turkish exporter amounted to a "draconian penalty" on the AD/CVD respondent for an "inadvertent technical error by its counsel that had no appreciable effect" on the investigations, the court said. The result was a 53.65% dumping rate and 158.44% countervailing duty rate for the exporter.
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade: