The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Commerce Department's failure to investigate and attribute subsidies received by respondent Antiqa Minerals' cross-owned affiliates and their suppliers in a countervailing duty investigation was unlawful, petitioner The Coalition for Fair Trade in Ceramic Tile argued in an Aug. 15 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Challenging the CVD investigation on ceramic tile from India, the coalition said Commerce's cross-ownership analysis of Antiqa was unsupported by substantial evidence (The Coalition for Fair Trade in Ceramic Tile v. United States, CIT # 25-00152).
In a decision made public Aug. 19, Court of International Trade Judge Claire Kelly again said the Commerce Department’s de facto specificity finding regarding the South Korean steel industry’s use of a countrywide electricity program lacked a rational explanation. Remanding the finding again, she told Commerce to apply the disproportionality analysis she defined in her first remand order (Hyundai Steel Co. v. United States, CIT # 23-00211).
Filing its own brief in support of its negative injury determination regarding aluminum extrusions from multiple countries, the International Trade Commission said Aug. 11 that it reasonably found that aluminum extrusion imports didn’t significantly undersell domestic products, noting the imports oversold them about two-thirds of the time and only undersold them the other one-third (U.S. Aluminum Extruders Coalition v. United States, CIT # 24-00209).
Exporters Maquilacero and Tecnicas de Fluidos on Aug. 13 opened a five-count case against the 2022-23 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on light-walled rectangular pipe and tube from Mexico. The companies challenged the Commerce Department's findings that products made by Tecnicas from light-walled rectangular tubing are within the scope of the order and the agency's decision to collapse Maquilacero and Tecnicas (Maquilacero S.A. de C.V. v. United States, CIT # 25-00176).
The Court of International Trade on Aug. 11 upheld the Commerce Department's 2021-22 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells from China in a confidential decision. Judge Mark Barnett gave the parties until Aug. 18 to review the confidential information in the decision. In the case, exporter Yingli Energy argued that the trade court should strike down the Commerce Department's ordinary presumption that exporters in non-market economies are under foreign government control, urging the court to undertake a Loper Bright analysis of the AD statute (see 2506050001) (Yingli Energy (China) Co. v. U.S, CIT # 24-00131).
The Commerce Department on Aug. 11 clarified the basis it used for applying adverse facts available against respondent Saha Thai Steel Pipe in the 2020-21 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on circular welded carbon and steel pipes and tubes from Thailand. Submitting its remand results to the Court of International Trade, Commerce said it reconsidered Saha Thai and BNK Steel Co.'s affiliation status and found that the two are affiliated based on AFA (Saha Thai Steel Pipe Public Co. v. U.S., CIT # 21-00627).
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The Commerce Department properly included importer Valeo North America's T-series aluminum sheet in the scope of the antidumping duty and countervailing duty orders on common alloy aluminum sheet from China, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held on Aug. 12. Judges Richard Taranto, Todd Hughes and Kara Stoll disagreed with the importer as to the ambiguity in the orders' scope and on whether its aluminum sheet falls outside the orders' scope, since it's heat-treated.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated on Aug. 5-7 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):