Defendant-intervenor Dixon Ticonderoga on Jan. 28 joined the Commerce Department in opposing pencil importer School Specialty’s scope ruling challenge before the Court of International Trade (School Specialty v. United States, CIT # 24-00098).
The Commerce Department's antidumping duty order on artist canvas from China is "void-for-vagueness and unconstitutional," importer Printing Textiles, doing business as Berger Textiles, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in its opening brief. The company argued that Commerce's "impermissibly unlawful" scope ruling including its canvas banner matisse within the scope of the order "denied Berger adequate notice," adding that the agency "failed to address due process concerns of vague language in the scope of the order" (Printing Textiles v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 25-1213).
The Commerce Department reasonably found that holding company Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy S.A. is an "exporter or producer" under its regulations in an antidumping duty investigation on wind towers from Spain, the Court of International Trade held on Jan. 28. Judge Timothy Stanceu said the agency appropriately considered the evidence and rejected petitioner Wind Tower Trade Coalition's position that Siemens Gamesa didn't have a role in the production of wind towers and, thus, didn't have to rescind the investigation on the company.
Two multilayered wood flooring exporters, Baroque Industries and Riverside Plywood, said Jan. 23 that the Commerce Department wrongly applied adverse facts available to several of Baroque’s input suppliers, determining they were under government control even though “[n]ecessary information for these eighteen suppliers was not missing from the record” (Baroque Timber Industries (Zhongshan) Co. v. United States, CIT # 24-00106).
After the Trump administration released a memo outlining the scope of trade action to be taken during his term, one thing became clear, according to a variety of trade attorneys: antidumping duty and countervailing duty rates are about to soar.
The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's decision on remand to drop the use of total adverse facts available against exporter Apiario Diamante Comercial Exportadora, with Apiario Diamante Producao e Comercial de Mel known as Supermel, in the antidumping duty investigation on raw honey from Brazil. The result saw Supermel's AD rate drop from 83.72% to 10.52%.
Colombian shopping bag exporter Ditar and domestic petitioner Coalition for Fair Trade in Shopping Bags each filed a motion for judgment in their respective cases challenging the results of the same antidumping duty investigation. Ditar, a mandatory respondent, argued the Commerce Department had been required to make a level-of-trade adjustment between its U.S. and home markets, while the Coalition alleged Ditar’s records were unreliable (Ditar v. United States, CIT # 24-00130; Coalition for Fair Trade in Shopping Bags v. United States, CIT # 24-00157).
The Commerce Department doesn't fail to act when it denies a Section 232 steel and aluminum tariff exclusion request, the Court of International Trade held. Instead, the denial is a "decision" and "not an action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed," Judge Stephen Vaden said, dismissing a host of claims from importer Prysmian Cables and Systems USA against Commerce's rejection of its exclusion requests.
The Treasury Department recently published more guidance on its outbound investment prohibition and notification rules (see 2412160044), including a new FAQ on how certain portions of the rules apply to in-house lawyers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit scheduled oral argument for the lead case on the Commerce Department's use of the Cohen's d test in its differential pricing analysis, for March 5 at 10 a.m. EST. The issue was previously remanded by the Federal Circuit for Commerce to explain its use of the d test despite not adhering to basic statistical assumptions, such as the normal distribution of data and roughly equal variances (see 2107150032). The agency said on remand that it didn't need to adhere to these assumptions, since it's using the entire population of data and not just a sample. The Court of International Trade upheld this explanation (see 2302270049) (Stupp Corp. v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1663).