The Court of International Trade on Feb. 12 sustained the Commerce Department's use of facts available for antidumping duty respondent Euro SME's inland freight costs for its U.S. sales. Judge Stephen Vaden said that contrary to the exporter's claim that Commerce "threw the book at it," the agency "acted with deliberation, patience, and arguably stayed its hand when it could have drawn adverse inferences more broadly against such a seasoned respondent."
A citric acid exporter said Feb. 9 that the Commerce Department had been wrong to refuse to do a quarterly analysis of the exporter’s costs even though it had faced large cost fluctuations due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Citribel N.V. v. U.S., CIT # 24-00010).
The International Trade Commission on Feb. 9 upheld on remand its prior finding that domestic industries were injured by dumped imports of seamless carbon and alloy steel standard, line and pressure pipe from Russia, rejecting an exporter’s claims that evidence showed the ITC’s analysis had missed some imports from other countries (PAO TMK v. United States, CIT # 21-00532).
The Court of International Trade on Feb. 12 sustained the Commerce Department's decision to use a simple average of standard deviations in the denominator of the Cohen's d test in detecting "masked" dumping as part of the antidumping investigation on steel nails from Taiwan. Despite a pair of decisions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejecting the use of simple averages in this case, Judge Claire Kelly said she could find no fault with the logic Commerce employed.
The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security again rejected 193 requests for exclusions from Section 232 steel and aluminum duties sought by importer California Steel Industries on its steel slab imports. Filing its remand results to the Court of International Trade on Feb. 9, BIS said that "no overriding national security concerns require that" the exclusions be granted (California Steel Industries v. United States, CIT # 21-00015).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Commerce Department still hasn't proven that Hyundai received a subsidy in the form of a “direct transfer of funds” from the South Korean government due to the country’s cap and trade program, the exporter said Feb. 5 in comments on the department’s remand results (Hyundai Steel Co. v. U.S. , CIT # 22-00170).
German exporters, led by Ilsenburger Grobblech, filed an opening brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit challenging the Commerce Department's decision to use adverse facts available against exporter Salzgitter Mannesmann Stahlhandel in an antidumping duty investigation on cut-to-length carbon and alloy steel plate from Germany (Ilsenburger Grobblech GmbH v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 24-1219).
Turkey's Ambassador Alparslan Acarsoy, chair of the World Trade Organization's agriculture negotiating body, introduced a draft negotiating text on Jan. 30, which could serve as the basis for talks in the run-up to the 13th Ministerial Conference, the WTO announced. The five-page draft text "builds on the negotiating submissions and interventions that members have made" along with "recent consultations in various formats."
En-Wei Eric Chang, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Taiwan, pleaded guilty Jan. 31 to conspiracy to export defense materials to Iran.