Bedroom Furniture Co. Challenges Scope Ruling Excluding Platform Beds From AD Order
U.S. importer CVB filed a complaint March 8 at the Court of International Trade claiming that the Commerce Department wrongly excluded importer Zinus' metal and wood platform beds from the antidumping duty order on wooden bedroom furniture from China (CVB v. U.S., CIT # 24-00036).
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Zinus filed a scope request on seven models of its products, each of which is made of wooden panel headboards or footboards that are framed or supported by metal. After Commerce opened the scope case, the AD petitioners, led by the American Furniture Manufacturers Committee for Legal Trade, said the scope language clearly says that the "existence of metal does not remove a product from the scope when the metal components are sold with a wooden headboard and/or footboard, as is the case with Zinus imports."
The trade group supported its arguments with the scope language and past scope rulings to argue that Commerce "has found such items within the scope on past occasions, CVB said. CVB submitted comments arguing that the scope includes "wooden headboards for beds" whether those headboards stand alone or are attached to side rails. The company additionally cited a CBP decision in an Enforce and Protect Act proceeding.
CVB's three-count complaint says that Commerce's scope ruling is unsupported because it ignores record evidence about the Zinus merchandise examined vis a vis the plain language of the Order." The record clearly shows that all of Zinus' beds had wooden headboards or footboards for beds, clearly placing them under the order's scope, the brief said.
The scope ruling also "misconstrues the plain language of the scope of the Order" by finding that the scope doesn't include metal and wood platform beds made of wooden panel headboards or footboards, "when the scope unequivocally states that it covers" wooden headboards and footboards for beds, CVB said. The agency "cannot interpret an antidumping order so as to change the scope of it by interpreting it in a manner contrary to its terms."
Lastly, CVB said the part of the scope ruling finding that Zinus' beds aren't covered because they aren't "made substantially of wood products" is "inconsistent with the primary interpretive sources relied upon from prior Department scope rulings for wooden bedroom products."