In one of his first actions as a CIT judge, Chief Judge Mark Barnett was handed a case reassigned from one of the court’s senior judges at the time, Judge R. Kenton Musgrave. The case, involving a duty drawback claim from BP Oil Supply Company, was filed in July 2004 and had languished in the court for years. Lengthy briefing schedules and a million motions to extend later, it had been nearly a decade since the initial complaint had been filed.
Court of International Trade activity
Importers seeking suspended liquidations of customs entries from China with Section 301 lists 3 and 4A tariff exposure under the July 6 preliminary injunction (PI) order of the Court of International Trade would need to file their requests in a “repository” to be set up in CBP's ACE database and back them up with emails to their appropriate CBP Center of Excellence and Expertise (CEE), say draft DOJ instructions filed with the court Friday in docket 1:21-cv-52. “We have conferred with plaintiffs and understand that they will respond separately with their responses to these draft instructions,” DOJ attorneys said. Akin Gump lawyers for sample case plaintiffs HMTX Industries and Jasco Products didn’t immediately comment. Lawyers on the plaintiffs' steering committee may repeat many of the same objections they raised at a July 23 status conference that the government, in complying with the PI order to suspend liquidations, is putting too much onus on importers for CBP's processing of their liquidation-suspension requests.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed an appeal from Novolipetsk Steel Public Joint Stock Company and Novex Trading (Swiss) SA on July 29 in a challenge of the 2016-17 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on hot-rolled flat rolled carbon-quality steel products. In November 2020, the Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's final results in the case, holding that it was reasonable for the agency to find that the statute permitted it to disregard sales it found were not bona fide from the review. After Novolipetsk and Novex took their case to the Federal Circuit, the plaintiffs also moved to reconsider the case in the trade court. CIT then denied their motion to reconsider the case in an April decision. The Federal Circuit's dissmissal of the appeal came without opinion.
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The U.S. is seeking more than $18 million from importer Crown Cork & Seal in a July 28 complaint filed in the Court of International Trade alleging that the company fraudulently misclassified its metal lid imports to skirt a 2.6% duty rate. The goods -- metal lids for food, beverage, household and consumer products -- are properly classified under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 8309.90.0000 and are dutiable at that 2.6% rate, the Department of Justice said. Instead, CCS attempted to classify its metal lid imports from Europe between 2004 and 2009 under HTS subheading 7326.90.1000, which has duty-free treatment (The United States v. Crown Cork & Seal, USA, Inc. et al., CIT #21-361).
A request from a group of four Chinese steel companies to dismiss a case in which the U.S. government alleged the group stole trade secrets was denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on July 26. The group, comprising Pangang Group Company (PGC) and three of its subsidiaries, is accused of stealing DuPont trade secrets for the production of titanium dioxide in violation of the Economic Espionage Act. In their motion to dismiss, the group claimed immunity from criminal prosecution under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), arguing that the group is an "instrumentality" of the Chinese government.
The Court of International Trade should remand the Commerce Department's failure to meet its obligation to verify the information of mandatory respondent Shakti Forge Industries in an antidumping duty investigation on forged steel fittings from India, petitioner Bonney Forge Corporation, along with the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union, said in a July 22 reply brief. Commerce's use of facts otherwise available doesn't excuse the agency from its duty to verify and leads to "absurd results," Bonney Forge said (Bonney Forge Corporation et al. v. United States, CIT #20-03837).
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ordered Hobby Lobby to forfeit a cuneiform tablet engraved with a portion of the epic of Gilgamesh, the Justice Department announced July 27. Hobby Lobby bought the tablet, dubbed the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet and originating in what is now Iraq, from an international auction house for display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Law enforcement seized the tablet in September 2019, as it was alleged to have been illegally brought into the U.S. An antiques dealer and a U.S. cuneiform export shipped it by international post without declaring the contents, the release said. “Forfeiture of the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet demonstrates the Department’s continued commitment to eliminating smuggled cultural property from the U.S. art market,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Thwarting trade in smuggled goods by seizing and forfeiting an ancient artifact shows the department’s dedication to using all available tools, including forfeiture, to ensure justice.”
The Commerce Department's use of Thai surrogate data in two antidumping administrative reviews of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells from China was not properly supported, the Court of International Trade said in two nearly identical July 28 decisions. Judge Claire Kelly, penning the opinions, sought to bring Commerce's practice in line with a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision that called unreasonable the agency's “bookend methodology” in selecting the surrogate data. Stopping short of instructing Commerce to cease its use of the Thai data, Kelly found that the agency's rationale was unsupported and remanded the surrogate value selection for further consideration or explanation.
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade: