Petitioner Opposes Scope Change on R-125 Blends, Says Old Scope Administrable
The Commerce Department’s recent change in the scope of its antidumping and countervailing duty investigations on pentafluoroethane (R-125) from China to address administrability concerns was unnecessary, and the original scope was no different than the scopes of other orders that rely on the word of importers to determine whether merchandise is subject to AD/CV duties, said Honeywell International, petitioner in the investigation, in a brief filed Sept. 14.
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As initially requested by Honeywell, the scope of the orders had not excluded unfinished blends of R-125 with other refrigerants. But in August, citing the difficulty of distinguishing the colorless, odorless refrigerants, Commerce changed the scope so that only unfinished blends containing 85% or more of R-125 are covered by the investigations.
As originally written, however, the scope was “no different than that for many other products, and further, presents no unique administrability concerns as posited by the Department,” Honeywell said in its brief. That the exact proportion of quantity and value of a blend would need to be determined “is true with respect to any other order applicable to any other product,” Honeywell said.
“For example, CBP has decades of experience administering orders applicable to steel products,” the brief said. “Steel is also an otherwise uniform physical product. Applicability of scope language to a particular steel product often turns on the specific percentage of carbon, magnesium, or other metals. To that end, parties must demonstrate whether an imported product is subject to a particular AD/CVD order by, for example, proffering mill certificates and certificates of analyses, and documentation demonstrating the entered value of the subject merchandise.”
Commerce already has several orders in place on ammonium nitrate, melamine, methionine and dioctyl terephthalate that cover blends of chemicals with other chemicals, yet set duties only on the chemical component subject to the order, Honeywell said. And the burden of such scope language would not fall on CBP, but on the importer, given the responsible care duties of importers to “enter, classify and determine the value of imported merchandise and to provide any other information necessary to enable CBP to properly assess duties,” it said.