Antidumping duty respondent Nagase & Co's oversight in submitting information to the Commerce Department leading to a "patently erroneous assessment rate," does not justify Commerce shirking its responsibility to provide remedial fairness, Nagase argued in an Aug. 29 reply brief at the Court of International Trade. While Nagase admits to its error, the respondent argued that Commerce still has an obligation to correct the mistake now that the agency knows of its existence (Nagase & Co. v. United States, CIT #21-00574).
Country of origin cases
The Commerce Department erred when it continued to rely on adverse facts available despite a remand order invalidating the agency’s original reasoning for the AFA rate, Cabinets To Go (CTG), a U.S. retail chain, said in its Aug. 29 comments filed to the Court of International Trade. CTG intervened in the challenge to a final determination from Commerce’s antidumping duty investigation on wooden cabinets and vanities from China (Dalian Meisen Woodworking v. U.S., CIT # 20-00109) because the calculated rates of its own suppliers were based on AFA rates for Meisen.
Solaiyappan Ramanathan, a permanent resident of Singapore, was ordered to pay a $558,000 fine by the Singapore State Courts for making false statements when applying for Preferential Certificates of Origin for goods his company exported, Singapore Customs announced Aug. 31. Solaiyappan is the former director of Feccuni Singapore Pte. and sole owner of Shakambri Overseas -- companies set up to import and export scrap metals and other metal products from local and overseas suppliers.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Aug. 30 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):
The Court of International Trade in an Aug. 26 opinion upheld the Commerce Department's remand results in a case over the 2016-17 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on oil country tubular goods from South Korea. In the remand results, Commerce reversed its decisions finding that a particular market situation existed for a key input of the OCTG products, and adjusting respondent Nexteel Co.'s reported costs for the value of non-prime products at their sales price and allocating the difference between the full production cost and market value of the non-prime products to the production costs of the prime OCTG.
The Commerce Department cannot select just one mandatory respondent in an antidumping review where multiple exporters have requested a review, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in an Aug. 29 nonprecedential opinion. Reversing the Court of International Trade's finding, judges Pauline Newman, Alvin Schall and Sharon Prost said Commerce's interpretation of the statute finding that it can use only one respondent runs "contrary to the statute's unambiguous language." The judges ruled the agency has not shown it to be otherwise reasonable to calculate the all-others rate based on only one respondent and said the directive to find a weighted average gives no reason why it's reasonable to use only a single rate.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Aug. 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):
The Commerce Department properly excluded dual-stenciled pipe from the antidumping duty order on circular welded carbon steel pipes and tubes from Thailand, the Court of International Trade ruled in an Aug. 25 opinion. Judge Stephen Vaden ruled that no line pipe was made in Thailand when the original AD investigation was conducted almost 40 years ago and that the International Trade Commission made no harm finding for line or dual-stenciled pipe from Thailand.
Chu Thang Trung, deputy director of Vietnam's Trade Remedies Authority, said exporting firms should diversify export markets to avoid "putting all their eggs in one basket," and skirt the challenges posed by increasing trade remedy investigations against Vietnamese goods, the state-run CustomsNews reported Aug. 26.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an Aug. 26 opinion rejected the plaintiff-appellants' appeal seeking to establish that the Commerce Department can make a particular market situation adjustment to the sales-below-cost test when calculating normal value. The appellate court previously rejected this claim in Hyundai Steel v. U.S. The appellants, led by American Cast Iron Pipe Company, sought to differentiate its case from Hyundai Steel by arguing that its case appeals an original investigation while the Hyundai Steel matter challenged an administrative review. The Federal Circuit failed to see how this would result in a different outcome and ruled against Borusan Mannesmann Boru Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S.