The Court of International Trade in an Aug. 4 order denied defendant Greenlight Organic and Parambir Singh Aulakh's motion for summary judgment over when the date that customs fraud was discovered for the purpose of finding whether the statute of limitations had ran out. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves ruled that the undisputed facts don't back any of three dates floated by the defendants as the date that the U.S. first received evidence of Greenlight's double invoicing scheme. In the scheme, Greenlight is accused of fraudulently misclassifying its Vietnam-origin knit garments. Choe-Groves ordered all parties to file a joint proposed pre-trial order.

The International Trade Commission erred in its determination that mattress imports injured the domestic industry and again when it argued in its defense at the Court of International Trade, importer CVB said in an August 1 brief at the Court of International Trade (CVB v. United States, CIT #21-00288).

The pay.gov system used by the Court of International Trade will undergo maintenance Aug. 6, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT. Documents that require payment through this system cannot be filed on CM/ECF during this time.

The Court of International Trade in an Aug. 1 order granted the U.S.'s motion to stay a consolidated case contesting an antidumping and countervailing duty evasion case after the plaintiffs, led by Dominican manufacturer Kingtom Aluminio, backed off their opposition to the stay. The plaintiffs did so after CBP flipped its evasion finding on importers Global Aluminum Distributor and Hialeah Aluminum Supply. In the Global Aluminum Distributor case, CBP said it no longer believes the importers evaded the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China by transshipping them through Kingtom in the Dominican Republic (see 2206150047). In Kingtom's two cases, the U.S. requested a stay until the court sorts out the Global Aluminum case. The stay was granted with Judge Richard Easton ordering the parties to confer and jointly submit a status report and a proposed briefing schedule 14 days from the date judgment is entered in the Global Aluminum Distributor case (Kingtom Aluminio v. United States, CIT Consol. #22-00072).

Various models of uninterruptable power supplies and surge voltage protectors were substantially transformed by manufacturing operations in the Philippines and should be required to be marked as "Products of China," Cyber Power Systems said in an Aug. 1 motion at the Court of International Trade (Cyber Power Systems v. U.S., CIT #20-00124).

The Commerce Department dropped its finding that a particular market situation distorted the price of a key input of circular welded non-alloy steel pipe, in Aug. 2 remand results submitted to the Court of International Trade in an antidumping duty case. Prior to this remand, Commerce had already dropped the PMS adjustment to one of the antidumping duty review's mandatory respondents but not the other. On remand for the fourth time in the action, the agency dropped the PMS adjustment for the remaining respondent, dropping non-selected respondent SeAH Steel Corp.'s dumping rate from 19.28% to 9.77% (Hyundai Steel Co. v. United States, CIT Consol. #18-00154).

The Commerce Department added certain service-related revenues in antidumping duty respondent Nippon Steel's U.S. price in voluntarily requested remand results, dropping the exporter's dumping margin from 11.70% to 10.12%. Agreeing it "inadvertently" left three service-related expenses out of its calculations of Nippon Steel's U.S. price, Commerce requested the voluntary remand, including them in the price calculations. Nippon Steel still took issue with Commerce's draft revision, prompting the agency to make further revisions to the calculation of the net price used in the differential pricing test and the revenue for the constructed export price (CEP) profit rate (Nippon Steel v. U.S., CIT #21-00533).

Trade Law Daily is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case you missed them. All articles can be found by searching on the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative often found itself weighing the possible harm to U.S. consumers from the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs against the need to give the duties enough teeth to curb China’s allegedly unfair trade practices, the agency said in its 90-page “remand determination,” filed Aug. 1 at the Court of International Trade (In Re Section 301 Cases, CIT #21-00052). Submitting its bid to ease the court's concerns over modifications made to the third and fourth tariff waves, USTR provided its justifications for removing various goods from the tariff lists ranging from critical minerals to seafood products.

Court of International Trade Judge Timothy Reif recently won a seven-year legal battle over the ownership of two early 20th century Austrian paintings allegedly stolen by the Nazis. The case ended following a one-sentence order from the State of New York Court of Appeals in May rejecting a London-based art dealer's bid to have his appeal heard on the merits. A lower court ordered in 2018 that two Egon Schiele paintings, valued at a combined $3.4 million, were to be transferred to the heirs of an Austrian Jewish entertainer who collected the works, later dying in a Nazi concentration camp. Reif is one of those heirs, Law.com reported. The paintings were owned by Fritz Grunbaum, a famous cabaret performer in pre-World War II Vienna and the first cousin of Reif's paternal grandfather, a story in Princeton Alumni Weekly said.