Plaintiff, Defendant in Three Cases Oppose Motion to Consolidate
A Vietnamese exporter and the U.S. both opposed March 20 defendant-intervenors’ motion to consolidate the exporter’s three cases fighting the assignment of adverse facts available to an exporter due to a minor submission delay (Hoa Phat Steel Pipe Co., Ltd. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00250).
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The exporter, Hoa Phat Steel Pipe, was selected as a mandatory respondent for multiple circumvention inquiries into light-walled welded rectangular carbon steel tubing from Taiwan, South Korea and China. Hoa Phat filed a questionnaire response for all three about two days late. It submitted an extension request at the end of the first day after the deadline, but accidentally called the proceeding an “investigation” rather than a “circumvention inquiry” on the request’s title page, so Commerce rejected the request and removed Hoa Phat’s filings from the record.
Hoa Phat filed three complaints to the Court of International Trade in November, one for each inquiry (see 2311290065). In their two March 20 briefs, the exporter and the U.S. both opposed a February motion to consolidate those three cases by a number of defendant-intervenor domestic petitioners.
Both argued that consolidation would be inefficient because each circumvention inquiry involves a separate antidumping order, a separate factual record and a separate administrative decision by Commerce.
“Consolidation of cases involving distinct administrative determinations risks an impermissible conflation of record facts that would contravene the Court’s review of a determination based solely upon the evidence in the underlying record,” the U.S. said.
They said that the court could take other actions to speed up proceedings without full consolidation, such as joining some issues during oral arguments or simply applying its reasoning in one case throughout all three.
However, Hoa Phat said that it “does not believe that consolidation would be significantly less efficient.” It said it would defer to the court’s judgment and didn't want to pursue further briefing should CIT choose to consolidate.