A Mexican farm owner accused of scheming to defraud the Export-Import Bank of more than $825,000 was sentenced to repay the defrauded amount plus a $2,000 fine and serve 60 months probation, the Bank announced April 25. Jaime Galvan-Guerrero, a 40-year-old Mexican citizen, was initially arrested in 2010, and pleaded guilty in August 2011 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of wire fraud in a scheme to defraud Ex-Im of $825,563, the Bank said in a statement.
The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department’s decision on remand to reverse a scope ruling, finding Welcom’s Magna Cart MCK utility cart to be outside the scope of the antidumping duty order on hand trucks from China (A-570-891). Commerce had originally found the utility cart to be in scope, because not all telescoping tubes in the frame were under 5/8 inch. But Welcom argued, and the court agreed in September, that the agency’s determination went against prior scope rulings 12100103. Welcom supported Commerce’s reversal on remand, and so did the court.
The Court of International Trade awarded Tianjin Magnesium International to pay over $40,000 in attorney fees and costs to the U.S. government and US Magnesium for its misconduct in court proceedings related to an antidumping duty administrative review on pure magnesium from China. The government was awarded its requested amount of $8,302.20 in full, but the court heavily reduced the $215,572.43 requested by US Magnesium to $34,042.72. The company should have gone off the “Laffey Matrix” of average attorneys fees, rather than the fees it actually billed, which ranged from $150 per hour for a paralegal to $645 an hour for a partner. CIT had originally said the fees and costs would be awarded in a November opinion (see 12112329).
The Florida Tomato Exchange (FTE) is challenging the Commerce Department's agreement with Mexican tomato growers to suspend an antidumping investigation on fresh tomatoes from Mexico. The FTE filed its complaint April 19 in the Court of International Trade, alleging that Commerce was operating outside of the statute when it entered into a fourth suspension agreement and revised reference prices.
Ralph Lauren Corporation agreed to pay more than $1.5 million in penalties and disgorgement to the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission on allegations the company bribed Argentinean government officials to obtain improper customs clearance of merchandise, the two federal agencies announced April 22.
X2Y Attenuators appealed an International Trade Commission ruling that Intel’s imports of microprocessors do not violate Section 337 (337-TA-781). The ITC determined in February not to review an administrative law judge’s finding that Intel’s chips don’t infringe on X2Y’s patents (see 13022119). The ruling ended the investigation.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reinstated a temporary restraining order blocking liquidation of entries of wind towers from China and Vietnam made during the “provisional measures” period between the preliminary determination and orders issued in the antidumping and countervailing duty investigations. The temporary restraining orders had been in place since March 4, pending the coalition’s challenge to the effective date of the AD/CV duty orders resulting from the investigations (see 13030820). Because of the injury vote in the investigations, the orders did not cover entries made between the preliminary determination and the AD/CV duty orders. The Court of International Trade denied the coalition’s motion for an injunction against liquidation, and dissolved the temporary restraining order (see 13040132), but the coalition appealed CIT’s ruling on April 3 (see 13040925). The appeals court is holding off on dissolution of the restraining order until it hears back from the government on the motion to stay.
A Colombian business owner convicted of attempting to defraud the Export-Import Bank of about $8 million -- through a scheme involving fake loan documents, deceiving wire transfers and forced defaults -- was ordered to pay more than $18 million and serve prison time, the Bank announced April 22. Juan Carlos Schwartzman, a Colombian citizen with permanent U.S. residency status, was sentenced in U.S. District Court on April 19 to 30 months in prison, plus 36 months of supervised release time and pay more than $18 million in restitution and forfeiture. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud in July 2011. Schwartzman owned J.C. Schwartzman & Associates, a trade finance consulting firm in Miami and Barranquilla, Colombia. The firm assisted several Colombian buyers in obtaining lender financing guaranteed by Ex-Im, the Bank’s Office of Inspector General said in a release.
Guangdong Yihua Timber Industry, a respondent in the Commerce Department’s 2007 antidumping duty administrative review on wooden bedroom furniture from China (A-570-890), appealed the Court of International Trade’s Feb. 5 decision to affirm the final results of that review (see 13020615). The proceeding had been subject to three CIT remands on different issues, including input data for calculation of surrogate values and the adverse facts available rate assigned to Orient International (see 11021816, 12040508, and 12091002, respectively.
Link Snacks appealed the Court of International Trade’s March 20 ruling in favor of CBP’s classification of its beef jerky as cured, rather than dried, beef. Link Snacks had argued that beef jerky is defined by the drying process used in its manufacture, not the curing process. The court was sympathetic to Link Snacks’ argument, but in the end found that it could not go against the plain meaning of the terms in the HTS (see 13032103).