The Court of International Trade should reject a Commerce Department Section 129 determination on ripe olives from Spain that continued to apply countervailing duties for subsidies to upstream raw olives despite an underlying World Trade Organization ruling to the contrary, a Spanish industry association and two foreign growers and exporters of olives argued in a Feb. 27 complaint at the Court of International Trade (Asociacion de Exportadores e Industriales de Aceitunas de Mesa v. U.S., CIT # 23-00039).

The Court of International Trade on Feb. 27 ruled in favor of an importer on the Philippine origin of one of its models of power supplies and surge protectors, but found the importer didn’t prove a substantial transformation occurred for five others and upheld CBP’s finding of Chinese origin for those models.

The Court of International Trade upheld the Commerce Department's interpretation of the Major Inputs Rule to allow for the use of third-country surrogate data as "information available" for determining the cost of production of a major input a respondent bought from an affiliated non-market economy-based supplier.

The Commerce Department adequately addressed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's concerns over its use of the Cohen's d test as part of its differential pricing analysis to root out "masked" dumping, the Court of International Trade held in a Feb. 24 opinion sustaining use of the test in an antidumping duty investigation.

The following lawsuit was recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

The Commerce Department stood by its usage of financial statements in an antidumping duty review on mattresses from Vietnam in remand results filed with the Court of International Trade Feb. 23. Following a remand by Judge Timothy Reif, Commerce continued to determine that the financial data it used was complete and publicly available and continued to use that information to derive surrogate financial ratios, leaving the AD rate for plaintiff Ashley Furniture at 144.92% (Ashley Furniture Industries, et al. v. U.S., CIT # 21-00283).

The Commerce Department in Feb. 23 remand results reversed course "under respectful protest" on a 26.5% subsidy rate it calculated for land provision by Indian national authorities in its countervailing duty investigation on granular polytetrafluorethylene resin from India (Gujarat Fluorochemicals Ltd. v. U.S., CIT # 22-00120).

Requiring all actions needed to implement a trade agreement to be specifically delegated by Congress to federal agencies would interfere with Fast Track Authority by effectively negating assurances to negotiating partners that Congress will implement the provisions as agreed to by the United States during the negotiation of the trade agreement, plaintiff-appellants, including the Canadian government, argued in a Feb. 22 reply brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Committee Overseeing Action for Lumber Internaitonal Trade Investigatoins or Negotiations v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 22-1021).

The Court of International Trade doesn't have jurisdiction to hear plaintiff-appellant Amsted Rail Co.'s attorney conflict of interest case because it should have instead been filed as a challenge to the antidumping and countervailing duty investigations, and in any case ARC doesn't prove a conflict of interest existed from the participation of its former counsel in the investigations, the ITC and defendant-intervenor Coalition of Freight Rail Producers argued in a pair of reply briefs filed Feb. 22 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Amsted Rail Co. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1355).

The Court of International Trade in a Feb. 24 opinion upheld the Commerce Department's use of the Cohen's d test as part of its differential pricing analysis to root out "masked" dumping, ruling that the agency "adequately addressed" questions raised by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit over the use of the test. The appellate court had held that use of the d test could be "problematic" when the distribution of a respondent's sales isn't normal, or in cases of few data points or minimal variance in the exporter's sales. Judge Claire Kelly held that Commerce sufficiently explained that the test adequately functions despite those concerns.