A Turkish rebar exporter and the government held oral arguments last week over the countervailability of a Turkish subsidy that Court of International Trade Judge Gary Katzmann implied could be considered de jure, but not de facto, specific. They also debated the reliability of a report on land benchmark prices that was prepared specifically for litigation and that included government rates (Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret v. U.S., CIT #23-00131).
CBP said in a customs ruling earlier this month that luxury goods sold between a related European exporter and U.S. importer weren't subject to restrictions on their use that barred the use of the transaction method. In addition, CBP excluded service fees between the companies from the actual price of the goods since the fees didn't pertain to the goods' importation, and the agency found that the relationship between the parties didn't preclude the use of the transaction value method to appraise the value of the goods.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
Two Thai exporters said in a motion for judgment June 13 that the Commerce Department wrongly determined they were circumventing an antidumping duty order on solar panels from China -- even though between three and four of the five relevant factors it analyzed weighed against a circumvention finding (Canadian Solar International Limited v. U.S., CIT # 23-00222).
Importer Marcatus QED filed a complaint on June 13 at the Court of International Trade, claiming that the Commerce Department erred in finding that the company's shipments of preserved garlic in brine fell within the scope of the antidumping duty order on fresh garlic from China (Marcatus QED v. United States, CIT # 24-00091).
Exporter Hyundai Steel continued to challenge the Commerce Department's finding that the South Korean government's cap-and-trade carbon emissions program was de jure specific, in comments on the agency's remand results filed at the Court of International Trade on June 13 (Hyundai Steel Co. v. United States, CIT # 22-00029).
Replying to an aircraft parts importer’s motion for judgment (see 2403110059) in a case that began in 2017, the government said that the importer's products are raw materials, not parts (Honeywell International Inc. v. U.S., CIT # 17-00256).
A Spanish aluminum exporter argued June 11 that the Commerce Department is unlawfully restricting its statutory requirement to consider levels of trade when calculating normal value by requiring there be “substantial differences,” rather than plain “differences,” in those levels to trigger that analysis (Compania Valencia De Aluminio Baux, S.L.U. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00259).
The U.S. and exporter Kaptan Demir told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that the Commerce Department "is afforded substantial deference in interpreting" whether an input is "primarily dedicated" to the production of its downstream product for purposes of assigning subsidies given to the input supplier to the downstream product maker (Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 24-1431).
The Court of International Trade on June 11 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in an antidumping duty investigation on Indonesian biodiesel after the agency disregarded Indonesian crude palm oil prices when constructing normal value for respondent Wilmar Trading.