The Court of International Trade on April 8 referred LE Commodities' challenge to 14 denied requests for exclusions from Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs to mediation before Judge Leo Gordon. The order was penned by Judge M. Miller Baker, who gave the parties until July 8 to complete the mediation, unless Gordon "recommends an extension" (LE Commodities v. United States, CIT # 22-00245).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
Judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit asked appellants to explain why they shouldn’t remand a case regarding the ambiguity of the term “butt-weld” in an antidumping duty order on butt-weld pipe fittings from China. They said that if the term is not ambiguous because industry practice defines it, as the appellants claim, then what the industry practice actually entails is a factual question that must be decided by the Commerce Department (Vandewater International v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1093).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on April 4 sustained the Commerce Department's decision that Australian exporter BlueScope Steel (AIS) didn't reimburse its affiliated U.S. importer, BlueScope Steel Americas, for antidumping duties. Judges Kimberly Moore, Todd Hughes and Leonard Stark echoed the Court of International Trade in finding that it would have been "unreasonable" for the exporter to include the AD in the price charged to the importer because the "exporter itself was not responsible for those duties."
The U.S. on March 25 supported the Commerce Department’s voluntary remand results that used an Italian steel exporter’s quarterly costs methodology to calculate its steel’s value and assigned the exporter a de minimis rate (Officine Tecnosider SRL v. U.S., CIT # 23-00001).
The Court of International Trade on March 26 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in the 2020-21 antidumping duty review on hot-rolled steel flat products from Japan. Judge Stephen Vaden said that since no party contests the remand results, which were voluntarily requested by Commerce so the agency could treat exporter Tokyo Steel Manufacturing Co. as a mandatory respondent, the case is upheld (Optima Steel International v. U.S., CIT # 23-00108).
A petitioner submitted its final brief March 25 opposing the Commerce Department’s continued use of India as a surrogate for Vietnam in its review of an antidumping duty order on frozen fish fillets. It argued that Commerce was mixing up the definitions of “same” and “comparable” in its surrogate selection process (Catfish Farmers of America v. U.S., CIT # 21-00380).
The Commerce Department doesn't consider a product's end-use while making scope rulings unless required to by the relevant antidumping or countervailing duty order, the government said March 26 as it opposed summary judgment in a scope ruling case regarding edge-glued boards from China (Hardware Resources v. U.S., CIT # 23-00150).
World Trade Organization members at the March 20-22 meeting of the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Committee reviewed the agreement on the application of SPS measures and "addressed a high number of trade concerns," the WTO said.
An importer said in a March 27 complaint that the Commerce Department shouldn't have found that its garlic cloves from China that are boiled, then frozen were subject to an antidumping duty order on fresh garlic (Export Packers Company Limited v. U.S., CIT # 24-00061).