The Court of International Trade on Dec. 21 approved two Commerce Department redeterminations finding ball bearings imported from Thailand are not subject to antidumping duties on tapered roller bearings from China (here) and (here), reiterating its recent stance that Commerce must in some cases conduct anti-circumvention inquiries in order to apply AD duties to third-country merchandise.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Dec. 14-20:
The Court of International Trade on Dec. 17 ruled on a series of questions related to suspension of liquidation and interest on antidumping and countervailing duties, but put off its final decision on whether a surety is actually liable for paying them until after a trial (here). In a long-running dispute over whether American Home Assurance Co. owes the government duties on entries where the government never provided notice of suspension of liquidation, the court ruled that neither AHAC nor the government proved whether the lack of notice actually hurt the surety.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Dec. 7-13:
The Environmental Protection Agency on Dec. 9 announced over $90,000 in fines on importers for violations of the Clean Air Act and Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (here), following joint operations with CBP at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland. EPA fined five importers for bringing in engines without proper emissions control labels and certificates of conformity, ordering them to reexport or destroy a total of 1,394 items. It also fined three importers for FIFRA labeling violations, but allowed them to import the violative products after relabeling.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Nov. 30 - Dec. 6:
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Nov. 23-29:
An annual effort to stop websites from illegally selling counterfeit products continues to grow, said ICE (here). Along with law enforcement agencies across 27 countries, ICE's Homeland Security Investigations shut down 37,479 websites that sold counterfeit merchandise online, up from the 29,684 seized domain names last year, the agency said. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, a U.S. interagency collaboration led by HSI, joined with Europol and Interpol for the operation, called In-Our-Sites VI. "Over the past year, and leading up to Cyber Monday, the IPR Center and its partners used both criminal and civil actions to successfully seize domain names.," said ICE. This was the sixth year the anti-counterfeiting website operation.
The Court of International Trade on Nov. 23 ruled in favor of an importer in a classification case that centered on now-obsolete sections of the tariff schedule (here), finding commercial printers imported by Xerox classifiable in the 2004 HTS under heading 8471 as units of automatic data processing machines. The government had argued the printers, subject to the 2004 HTS because they were imported that year, were instead classifiable as “other office machines” under heading 8472 because their speed and quality moved them out of the realm of mere office printers. However, CIT held to the long-held tenet that a tariff term must be interpreted to embrace all articles that subsequently come within its scope, finding the Xerox commercial printers have data processing capabilities that make them ADPs regardless of their print quality or speed. Tariff provisions classifying certain printers as ADPs were superseded by the World Customs Organization’s 2007 changes to the tariff schedule, which moved subheadings for laser printers to heading 8443 (see 06080430).
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Nov. 16-22: