Antidumping duty petitioner Ventura Coastal and respondent Louis Dreyfus Company Sucos traded briefs on the impact and relevance the Supreme Court's recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which eliminated the Chevron principle of deferring to agencies' interpretations of ambiguous statutes (Ventura Coastal v. United States, CIT # 23-00009).
The Court of International Trade on Aug. 13 sustained the Commerce Department's countervailing duties on ribbon exporter Yama Ribbons and Bows pertaining to its reception of synthetic yarn and caustic soda, two ribbon inputs, for less than adequate remuneration. Judge Timothy Stanceu said Commerce adequately used adverse facts available in multiple instances of the subsidy analysis due to the Chinese government's failure to respond to the agency to the best of its ability.
The South Korean government urged the Court of International Trade to not confuse "disparity" with "disproportionality" in assessing the Commerce Department's de facto specificity finding on the Korean government's alleged provision of electricity below cost. Filing a reply brief on Aug. 12 in a case on the 2021 countervailing duty review on cut-to-length carbon-quality steel plate from South Korea, the Korean government said the fact that a few industries used a large amount of electricity doesn't establish de facto specificity (Hyundai Steel Co. v. United States, CIT # 23-00211).
A domestic glycine producer brought its case to the Court of International Trade to make up for omissions and errors it made in a scope ruling application, the U.S. claimed Aug. 9. It asked the court to reject the producer’s motion for judgment because it had failed to exhaust its arguments during the administrative process (Deer Park Glycine, LLC v. U.S., CIT # 23-00238).
Exporters Shanghai Tainai Bearing Co. and C&U Americas argued in an Aug. 13 motion for judgment at the Court of International Trade that the Commerce Department's differential pricing analysis is not allowed by the statute in antidumping reviews and is only permissible for AD investigations (Shanghai Tainai Bearing Co. v. United States, CIT # 24-00025).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an Aug. 13 opinion again affirmed the president's ability to make trade-restrictive modifications to Section 201 safeguard tariffs. Judges Alan Lourie, Richard Taranto and Leonard Stark partially granted a group of solar cell exporters' motion for panel rehearing of its 2023 decision, which came to the same conclusion, so that the court could conduct a de novo review of the applicable statute, instead of reviewing whether the president's interpretation of the law was a "clear misconstruction" of the statute.
An exporter and a petitioner each filed an opposition to the Commerce Department’s final results upon remand for an antidumping duty review on Indian-origin steel pipe, in which the department provided a strong defense of adverse facts available as a tool to combat the problem of noncooperative unaffiliated suppliers (see 2407100037) (Garg Tube Export v. U.S., CIT # 21-00169).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
Russian exporter Industrial Group Phosphorite told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that the Commerce Department contradicted the countervailing duty statute in finding that the Russian government's provision of natural gas was de facto specific. Filing a reply brief on Aug. 7, the exporter said Commerce can't find that the agrochemical industry is the "predominant user of natural gas" by only comparing its usage among a subset of natural gas users as opposed to all natural gas users (The Mosaic Co. v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 24-1593).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Aug. 7 said the Commerce Department's use of only adverse facts available rates to set the rate for the non-individually examined respondents in antidumping proceedings, known as the "expected method," is not presumptively unreasonable. Judges Alan Lourie and Kara Stoll said instead that the "burden is on Commerce to justify a departure from the expected method, not to justify its use."