The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
Drawback
A duty drawback is a refund by CBP of the duties, taxes, or fees paid on imported goods, which were imposed upon importation. More broadly, a drawback also includes the refund or remission of other excise taxes pursuant to other provisions of law. CBP's duty drawback scheme under the Customs Act of 1962 allows exporters to receive a refund on customs duties they paid on imported products that are then used or incorporated into other products for export or remain unused until importation.
In one of his first actions as a CIT judge, Chief Judge Mark Barnett was handed a case reassigned from one of the court’s senior judges at the time, Judge R. Kenton Musgrave. The case, involving a duty drawback claim from BP Oil Supply Company, was filed in July 2004 and had languished in the court for years. Lengthy briefing schedules and a million motions to extend later, it had been nearly a decade since the initial complaint had been filed.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated July 22 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):
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated June 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):
Trade Law Daily is providing readers with some recent top stories. All articles can be found by searching on the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
Turkish steel exporter Habas Sinai ve Tibbi Gazlar Istihsal Endustrisi A.S. was denied a petition for a panel rehearing by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a May 20 order said. Habas had been seeking to overturn a March 30 Federal Circuit decision that affirmed the Commerce Department's imposition of a 14.01% countervailing duty on its exports of steel concrete reinforcing bar from Turkey. In its investigation, Commerce imposed its facts otherwise available principle since the exporter was not forthcoming about benefits received under a Turkish duty drawback program. Commerce derived the 14.01% rate from a prior rate the agency assessed on an export tax rebate program in a 1986 CVD investigation on welded pipe and tube from Turkey. Habas requested a rehearing of the decision on the grounds that it is unlawful to use an adverse facts available (AFA) rate from a program that Commerce has verified to have been terminated and that it is unlawful for the agency to fail to apply its own practice in selecting a rate for application of AFA.
The Court of International Trade upheld the Commerce Department's second remand results which, under court order, added the full amount of duty drawback adjustment to two companies' export prices and nixed two circumstances of sale adjustments in an antidumping case on Turkish steel. Judge Gary Katzmann in his May 20 opinion ruled against arguments from petitioner Nucor Corporation that Commerce find another "duty neutral" methodology for allocating the drawback adjustment. Commerce had originally applied the adjustment to all production, effectively reducing the adjustment to export prices for Icdas Celik Enerji Tersane and Habas Sinai in an antidumping duty investigation on carbon and alloy steel wire rod from Turkey.
The Court of International Trade upheld the Commerce Department's second remand results which, under court order, added the full amount of duty drawback adjustment to two companies' export prices and nixed two circumstances of sale adjustments in an antidumping case on Turkish steel.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the Court of International Trade's decision to reject a Commerce Department methodology for calculating antidumping duty margins, in a May 14 opinion. In the ruling, the Federal Circuit found Commerce's attempt to allocate import duties exempted or rebated "based on the import duty absorbed into, or imbedded in, the overall cost of producing the merchandise under consideration," when constructing the export price in an AD review, was unsupported by the law. Commerce attempted this new methodology for calculating the U.S. price for Indian exporter Uttam Galva Steels Limited in an antidumping duty investigation into corrosion-resistent steel products (CORE) from India.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on May 14 upheld the Court of International Trade's decision to reject the Commerce Department's duty drawback adjustment methodology for an Indian exporter in an antidumping duty investigation on corrosion-resistant steel products. Rather than follow its normal method of adjusting only the export price for drawback received by the exporter, Commerce in the investigation adjusted the exporter's overall costs of production, including for home market goods, resulting in a higher AD duty rate. Like CIT, the Federal Circuit held the broader allocation ran afoul of the relevant statute, which only requires an adjustment to export price.