The Court of International Trade on Jan. 19 sustained the Commerce Department's use of exporter PhosAgro's profit before tax number instead of its gross profit mark when calculating the company's phosphate mining rights benefit.
New questionnaire responses showed it was a common domestic practice to reship surplus merchandise accidentally ordered to flooded markets, the International Trade Commission said as it continued to find on remand that Moroccan and Russian phosphate fertilizer had depressed U.S. fertilizer prices and harmed U.S. industry (OCP v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 21-00219).
A Greek pipe exporter said Commerce made an error calculating its dumping rate, then violated antidumping duty laws when it didn't allow comment before hitting it with an adverse facts available rate, in a Jan. 16 reply brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Corinth Pipeworks Pipe Industry v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-2094).
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 was right to collapse two Mexican exporters in a recent review on light-walled rectangular pipe and tube from Mexico, a petitioner said in a Jan. 8 brief (Maquilacero v. U.S., CIT # 23-00091) .
The Commerce Department lowered all Moroccan phosphate fertilizer exporters’ countervailing duty rates from 19.97% to 7.41% in its final redetermination on remand of the final determination in a CVD investigation. However, it refused to reverse a finding that a Moroccan government program granting reductions in tax fines and penalties was de facto specific to the investigation’s sole respondent (The Mosaic Co. v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 21-00116).
The Court of International Trade upheld the Commerce Department's decision to accept antidumping duty respondent Oman Fasteners' supplemental questionnaire response after initially rejecting it for being submitted 16 minutes late. Judge M. Miller Baker, in a Jan. 5 opinion made public Jan. 16, nodded to his prior opinion in the case, in which he held that the rejection of the submission was "the very definition of abuse of discretion" (see 2307170036). The result was a zero percent dumping margin for the exporter.
An Italian tire company had not adequately proven it wasn't controlled by the Chinese government, especially as substantial evidence existed to the contrary, the U.S. said Jan. 5 in response to the exporter’s appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Pirelli Tyre v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-2266).
Solar panel exporters, led by the Solar Energy Industries Association, urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to rehear their case on President Donald Trump's decision to revoke a Section 201 tariff exclusion on bifacial solar panels (Solar Energy Industries Association v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 22-1392).
The Commerce Department's use of thresholds proposed by Dr. Jacob Cohen -- the creator of the Cohen's d test -- for evaluating the d statistic in the agency's analysis to detect "masked" dumping isn't line with "normal statistical practice," exporter SeAH Steel Corp. argued in a Jan. 8 reply brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Stupp Corp. v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1663).