Counterweights for mini-excavators are "backhoe" parts and should not be excluded from Section 301 tariffs, DOJ argued in an April 28 brief at the Court of International Trade. The brief bolstered the government's January motion for judgment (see 2301240063) by arguing that the Bobcat mini-excavators that the counterweights are "designed for and exclusively used on" are themselves "backhoes" (Norca Engineered Products v. U.S., CIT # 21-00305)
The Court of International Trade upheld the Commerce Department's remand results in an antidumping duty review on activated carbon from China. In an April 28 opinion, Judge Mark Barnett said the court was satisfied with the agency's further explanation of its surrogate value selection for coal-based carbonized materials and its selection of financial statements used to calculate surrogate ratios.
A product's use is not a consideration regarding its classification at the subheading level when neither Harmonized Tariff Schedule heading the product could belong to is a use provision, the Court of International Trade ruled. Finding that ME Global’s heat-treated forged steel rods fell under CBP’s preferred classification of subheading 7228.40.00 as “other bars and rods, not further worked than forged,” Judge Richard Eaton said that ME Global could not use the products’ use nor reference to a subheading given that the court was evaluating two eo nomine headings. Eaton added that heading 7228 was more specific than 7236 and that subheading 7228.40.00 was more specific than 7228.30.80.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on May 1 upheld the Commerce Department's valuation of an activated carbon input using data from a country different from the primary surrogate country. Judges Todd Hughes, Kara Stoll and Leonard Stark said that just because Commerce departed from what it typically does in preferring to take all the data from the primary surrogate country, this "does not mean that what it did do is unsupported by substantial evidence."
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the Commerce Department's final results in the 2017-18 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on activated carbon from China. Judges Todd Hughes, Kara Stoll and Leonard Stark ruled that Commerce properly picked Malaysia as the primary surrogate country, valued bituminous coal with a known calorific value using Malaysian Harmonized System subheading 2701.19 and valued bituminous coal with an unknown calorific value using Romanian HS subheading 2701.12. Stark, the author of the opinion, said the appellants, led by Carbon Activated Tianjin Co., failed to exhaust arguments against the valuation of coal tar pitch.
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 erred in its selection of surrogate values and data sets in an antidumping duty investigation on mobile access equipment and subassemblies from China, the Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment said in a reply brief filed April 25 at the Court of International Trade. The court should remand the final determination in the AD investigation to Commerce, the coalition argued (Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment v. U.S., CIT # 22-00152).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated April 26 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):