Despite sales terms to the contrary, a Hong Kong middleman never held title to merchandise imported from China and Taiwan into the U.S., so “first sale” valuation is unavailable and the goods should be valued at the price paid by the importer, CBP said in a recent ruling. Incoterms aside, the importer paid for freight and insurance, and title transferred alongside risk of loss directly from the manufacturer to the importer, with the middleman acting more as agent, CBP said in HQ H316892.
Notable CROSS rulings
The Court of International Trade in a Sept. 22 opinion denied plaintiff Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret's motion to stay its countervailing duty review challenge pending resolution of a case over the previous review of the same CVD order. Judge Gary Katzmann said the stay would not promote judicial economy since the pending cases are before CIT and not the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and that Kaptan has not put forth any "pressing need" for a stay. The judge commented on the lack of any "talismanic formula" for finding when a stay motion should be granted and the need to weigh the various conditions at play.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Sept. 20 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 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit should allow the U.S. to double its word count in its reply brief in a case on President Donald Trump's move to revoke a tariff exclusion for bifacial solar panels, the U.S. argued in a Sept. 15 brief at the appellate court. The government argued that good cause exists for their motion since it must reply to the issue of presidential authority raised by the appellees along with several alternative problems, and because the importance of the issues in question warrant an enlargement of the word count (Solar Energy Industries Association v. United States, Fed. Cir. #22-1392).
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Sept. 12 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 Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Sept. 5 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 a Sept. 2 opinion upheld parts and sent back parts of the Commerce Department's final determination in the countervailing duty investigation on phosphate fertilizers from Russia. In a case contested by respondents PhosAgro Cherepovets and EuroChem and petitioners LLC Industrial Group Phosphorite and The Mosaic Co., Judge Jane Restani found that Commerce erred in adjusting the natural gas benchmark price by adding the relevant 20% VAT and 5% import duty and misapplying its methodology in calculating EuroChem's total sales by relying on a number given by EuroChem that included sales from eight producers and input suppliers to export trading company EuroChem Trading Rus. The judge also sent back Commerce's cut-off date for measuring subsidies in the Russian economy.
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 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 following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York: