CIT Vacates 2017 Mexico Sugar AD/CVD Suspension Agreement Update
The Court of International Trade on Oct. 18 overturned updated agreements suspending antidumping and countervailing duties on sugar from Mexico, finding Commerce illegally withheld information on conversations with Mexican sugar producers during the 2017 negotiations on the deal. The court held that Commerce’s failure to write memorandums detailing those conversations meant CSC Sugar, a U.S. importer and refiner of Mexican sugar that opposes the updated suspension agreements, did not have a chance to comment on the substance of parts of the underlying negotiations. Commerce is required by law and its own regulations to keep a complete administrative record of AD/CVD proceedings, CIT said.
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“The court stated that the Commerce decision was vacated and that the amended agreement with Mexico is null and void,” law firm Husch Blackwell, which represented CSC Sugar, said in a press release. “This is the first decision in which a suspension agreement of any kind has been overturned,” it said. “We’re pleased that the court agreed with our argument concerning recordkeeping and material information that was not placed on the record,” said Jeffrey Neeley of Husch Blackwell. “We look forward to working with the government over the coming weeks and months to develop a lasting solution to the issues our case addressed.”
The 2017 deal had updated a suspension agreement entered into in 2014 during the original antidumping and countervailing duty investigations on sugar from Mexico (see 1412240020). The update reduced the threshold for sugar defined as “refined” from a purity of 99.5 percent to 99.2 percent, and dropped the percentage of refined -- as opposed to unrefined -- sugar that may be imported from 53 percent to 30 percent (see 1706070016). That imperiled “CSC’s business, whose cutting-edge refining processes were developed to use a higher purity input,” Husch Blackwell said in its press release. Commerce did not comment on what comes next, including whether the original 2014 terms of the suspension agreement will resume effect.