Shrimp Petitioners Move to Strike Exporter's Reply Brief, Say It Contains Extra-Record Info
Petitioners for the countervailing duty review of Thai shrimp jointly asked the Court of International Trade on Dec. 15 to strike an exporter’s reply brief, saying the brief relied on non-record factual information (Soc Trang Seafood Joint Stock Co. v. United States, CIT # 25-00030).
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In August, exporter Soc Trang Seafood Joint Stock Co. filed a brief saying that the Commerce Department’s selected surrogate value for industrial land value was distorted, having been based on two reports the petitioners placed on the record that contained data for both industrial and logistical land (see 2508250047).
In a joint brief, defendant-intervenors Ad Hoc Shrimp Trade Action Committee and the American Shrimp Processors Association moved Dec. 15 to strike the brief. One of the two briefs wasn’t actually on the record, they said.
“Defendant-Intervenors are filing this motion as expeditiously as possible after discovering that Plaintiff’s reply brief made false statements concerning the administrative record under review and express their regret that this motion is being submitted so close to the scheduled oral argument,” they said.
They said they hadn’t realized until Dec. 11 that one of the two reports the August brief discussed was “rejected by Commerce and ‘expunged’ from ACCESS.” That was when the exporter’s counsel asked the petitioners for consent to “correct an error in a factual statement in its reply brief,” they said.
The report discussed in the August brief, “Thailand Logistics Property Market H1 2022,” wasn’t on the record and wasn’t considered by Commerce in its final determination, the petitioners said. As a result, the trade court had to strike it to avoid accidentally considering misleading information, they said.
They acknowledged that “motions to strike are generally disfavored,” but said that the remedy was appropriate in this case because references to the report “run throughout Plaintiff’s reply.”