The Court of International Trade in a June 22 opinion made public June 30 upheld CBP's affirmative evasion finding related to imports of hardwood plywood from American Pacific Plywood, Global Forest and InterGlobal Forest. CBP said the companies skirted antidumping and countervailing duties on the plywood from China by transshipping their imports through Cambodia. Judge M. Miller Baker ruled that the importers' due process claims relating to their lack of access to confidential information fell flat since they failed to claim that the public summaries of the information were insufficient. The judge added that CBP didn't misapply the substantial evidence standard in the investigation, contrary to the importers' claims. Baker said the companies conflated "evidence" with "concrete proof."

The Court of International Trade granted U.S. steel company Nucor Corp.'s bid to dismiss its suit on the 2020 administrative review of the countervailing duty order on corrosion-resistant steel products from South Korea. Nucor launched the suit to contest the Commerce Department's finding that electricity in South Korea that was provided for less than adequate remuneration conferred no benefit (see 2304070054). Nucor claimed that the agency was required to verify questionnaire responses from the South Korean government regarding the provision of the electricity (Nucor Corp. v. United States, CIT # 23-00058).

The Commerce Department stuck by its decision to apply adverse facts available to antidumping duty respondent Meihua along with its decisions not to rescind its review of Deosen Biochemical and not to recalculate a separate rate in spite of a court order to reconsider all three, in remand results filed with the Court of International Trade on June 27 (Meihua Group International (Hong Kong) v. U.S., CIT # 22-00069).

Chinese exporter Carbon Activated Tianjin Co. and its U.S. importer Carbon Activated Corp. will appeal a Court of International Trade decision upholding the Commerce Department's surrogate value picks for coal-based carbonized materials and financial statement selections used to calculate surrogate ratios. The companies are challenging an antidumping duty administrative review on activated carbon from China, the June 27 notice of appeal said. CIT Judge Mark Barnett ruled that Commerce's pick of Malaysian data for Harmonized System subheading 4402.90.1000 to value carbonized material was backed by substantial evidence, as was the agency's selection of the 2018 Bravo Green financial statements (see 2305010006) (Carbon Activated Tianjin Co. v. U.S., CIT # 21-00131).

The Commerce Department should have applied adverse facts to a Korean oil country tubular goods respondent for "failing" to provide information that the department did not request and the government's claim that it so is "demonstrably false," SeAH Steel said in a June 27 response brief at the Court of International Trade (SeAH Steel v. U.S., CIT # 22-00338).

The government incorrectly claimed that there are two separate jurisdictional paths for contesting Enforce and Protect Act decisions, appellants Ascension Chemicals, UMD Solutions, Crude Chem Technology and Glob Energy Corp. argued in a reply brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (All One God Faith v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1078).

The Commerce Department stuck with its use of the Cohen's d test as part of its effort to root out "masked" dumping in an antidumping review after adding certain academic literature to the record as instructed by the Court of International Trade. Submitting its remand results to the trade court June 27, Commerce said certain statistical assumptions -- normality of the distribution, equal variances and around the same sample size -- don't limit the agency's use of the d test, given that it used the entire population of data as opposed to a sample (Nexteel Co. v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 18-00083).

The Court of International Trade granted importer Global Invacom's bid to dismiss its customs suit on the classification of its low noise blocks and switches. The company argued that the items should be classified under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheadings 8517.69.00 or 8517.70.00, free of duty, which provides for "transmission apparatus for radio-broadcasting." CBP classified them under subheading 8525.50.30 as "transmission apparatus for radio-broadcasting or television, whether or not incorporating reception apparatus or sound recording or reproducing apparatus; television cameras, digital cameras and video camera recorders: Transmission apparatus: Television: Other," dutiable at 1.8%, 1.3% or 0.9%. In 2020, the trade court sided with the U.S. in a customs spat concerning the terms in headings 8517 and 8525 and the classification of printed circuit board assemblies (Global Invacom v. United States, CIT # 21-00261).

Antidumping respondents led by Z.A. Sea Foods (ZASF) mischaracterized the record when arguing in favor of the Court of International Trade's rejection of the Commerce Department's finding that ZASF's third country sales to Vietnam were not representative of the company's sales in the third country market, petitioner Ad Hoc Shrimp Trade Action Committee said in a reply brief. The petitioner told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that the trade court illegally reweighed the evidence on ZASF's Vietnamese sales, usurping Commerce's authority in the AD review on frozen warmwater shrimp from India (Z.A. Sea Foods Private Ltd. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1469).

CBP's attempts to collect a 14-year-old bond for antidumping duties on Chinese garlic should be thrown out because the agency's collection policy change "fundamentally altered" the responsibilities of all parties to the bond, said surety Aegis Security Insurance in its June 26 brief at the Court of International Trade (U.S. v. Aegis Security Insurance, CIT # 20-03628).