The Court of International Trade in a Sept. 6 opinion granted the U.S. request for a voluntary remand to reconsider the Commerce Department's decision to reject Section 232 steel and aluminum duty exclusions for three companies, AM/NS Calvert, California Steel Industries and Valbruna Slater Stainless. Judge M. Miller Baker said that if on the remand, the government grants the exclusions, Commerce must tell CBP to "honor the exclusions" on entries that have not finally liquidated "when those requests were originally denied." The judge also rejected the U.S. motion to dismiss the case as to the finally liquidated entries, finding that the Administrative Procedure Act allows for reliquidation of finally liquidated entries since no other statute expressly forbids this relief.
Country of origin cases
A complaint by Turkish exporter Eregli Demir ve Celik Fabrikalari (Erdemir) that challenged the International Trade Commission's decision not to institute a changed circumstances review of the antidumping duty order on hot-rolled steel flat products from Turkey should be dismissed because Erdemir's claim was rendered moot when the ITC conducted a full sunset review, the ITC said in an Aug. 31 brief at the Court of International Trade (Ereğli Demir ve Çelik Fabrikalari v. U.S. International Trade Commission, CIT # 22-00350).
The Commerce Department failed to provide a compelling reason for its doubling of its dumping margin calculation for Cambodian mattress makers on remand, Best Mattress International and Rose Iron Furniture said in their Aug. 30 remand comments. The firms said the decision was unsupported by substantial evidence, as were its decision to use a simple average in surrogate value cost calculations and its reliance on financial statements from Emirates Sleep (Best Mattresses International v. U.S., CIT # 21-00281).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Organization of Professional Aviculturists and the Lineolated Parakeet Society told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit that the Fish and Wildlife Service illegally rejected their petitions to add two avian species to the list of birds that can be imported to the U.S. The avian advocacy groups argued that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida erroneously dismissed their case by ruling that the plain language of the Wild Exotic Bird Conservation Act does not require species to be listed by the specific countries of origin from which they can be imported (Organization of Professional Aviculturists v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 11th Cir. # 23-11984).
Door thresholds imported by Worldwide Door Components and Columbia Aluminum Products are both expressly and generally within the scope of antidumping and countervailing orders on aluminum extrusions from China, petitioner Aluminum Extrusions Fair Trade Committee said in an Aug. 29 reply at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Worldwide Door Components v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1532) (Columbia Aluminum Products v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1534).
Lionshead Specialty Tire and Wheel, TexTrail and TRAILSTAR evaded antidumping and countervailing duty orders on imported steel trailer wheels from China, CBP concluded in the results of a recently released Enforce and Protect Act (EAPA) investigation. CBP found that the three importers had entered steel wheels using false statements that they didn't contain covered merchandise even though the importers contended that they believed the wheels were out of scope.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an Aug. 28 order allowed the Canadian government and eight Canadian exporters to file an amicus brief in a case on the Commerce Department's use of the Cohen's d test as part of its analysis to root out "masked" dumping. The Canadian government and companies asked for leave to file the brief earlier this month in the case in which the appellate court originally questioned the use of the test, arguing that Commerce is not using the statistical tool "in any coherent sense" (see 2308020027). The brief objected to the agency's defense of the test, which said that it can use the tool despite not satisfying base statistical assumptions since it is using the whole population of data instead of a sample (Stupp Corp. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1663).
The Commerce Department's use of an adverse inference against exporter Yama Ribbons and Bows Co. for its supposed benefit from China's Export Buyer's Credit Program was "critically flawed," the Court of International Trade ruled on Aug. 25. Judge Timothy Stanceu, remanding the 2018 review of the countervailing duty order on woven ribbon from China, said that Commerce based its use of adverse facts available on "missing" information from the Chinese government that the agency never actually requested. The judge added that submissions from the Chinese state, along with Yama itself, stand as enough to refute any finding that the exporter benefitted from the EBCP.