In remand results released Aug. 15, the Commerce Department maintained its application of adverse facts available to Vietnamese exporters investigated in a solar cells circumvention inquiry (Trina Solar (Vietnam) Science & Technology Co. v. United States, CIT # 23-00228).
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated on Aug. 14-15 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):
Chinese exporters of steel racks submitted a complaint Aug. 19 to the Court of International Trade objecting to the Commerce Department's use of Cohen's d test in its affirmative dumping finding (Jiangsu Nova Intelligent Logistics Equipment Co. v. U.S., CIT # 25-00175).
Court of International Trade Judge Timothy Reif ruled Aug. 21 that Canadian lumber exporter J.D. Irving’s 2022 case challenging the cash deposit rate assigned to certain entries should have been brought to a binational panel under 1581(c), not to the trade court under 1581(i). He said that the “true nature” of the exporter’s case was a challenge to a 2019 antidumping duty review’s results. His analysis, he said, was identical to the analysis offered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit when it upheld Reif’s dismissal of the exporter’s prior case (J.D. Irving v. United States, CIT # 22-00256).
Court of International Trade Judge Claire Kelly again remanded the Commerce Department’s de facto specificity finding regarding South Korea’s below-cost provision of off-peak electricity in a countervailing duty administrative review, saying the department still hasn’t rationally explained why it grouped three unrelated industries and found that they, together, disproportionately received the subsidy.
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).