The Court of International Trade on Aug. 18 dismissed a lawsuit filed by the maker of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps and other importers to challenge an Enforce and Protect Act determination that they evaded antidumping duties on xanthan gum from China. The trade court found the soapmaker, All One God Faith, as well as another importer did not file suit under jurisdiction provisions for denied protests, and so could not overcome the erroneous liquidation of their entries by CBP.
The Court of International Trade on Aug. 16 remanded the Commerce Department's cost calculations for a Brazilian paper manufacturer in the third administrative review of the antidumping duty order on uncoated paper from Brazil. Judge Gary Katzmann remanded back to Commerce the issue of its inclusion of Suzano’s derivative expenses in its cost of production. The judge ordered Commerce to provide the court with its remand results within 90 days.
The Court of International Trade ruled that a nitrogen oxide sensor probe for diesel engines should be classified as an instrument of chemical analysis under Harmonized Tariff Schedule heading 9027, rather than an instrument of measurement under heading 9026. Continental Automotive Systems sued CBP over the classification and Judge Jane Restani ruled in favor of the government in the Aug. 12 decision.
Minor issues in reporting home market sales in an antidumping duty administrative review don’t rise to the level that would justify an adverse facts available margin for an exporter’s large power transformers from South Korea, and the exporter’s purported lack of cooperation in a previous year’s administrative review does not give Commerce leeway to apply AFA anyway, said the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in an Aug. 11 decision. Affirming a decision of the Court of International Trade, the Federal Circuit upheld the lower court’s finding that the errors in a small subset of Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems’s reported home market sales “were inadvertent and were corrected without undue difficulty,” and should not have served as the basis for the 60.81% AFA rate originally assigned by Commerce. On remand, Commerce had dropped its reliance on AFA and calculated a zero percent AD duty rate. Hitachi, petitioner in the case, had appealed.
Remand redeterminations recently submitted by the Commerce Department in two related cases are not final agency decisions that can be sustained by the Court of International Trade, and doing so would circumvent the trade court’s judicial review process, CIT said in a pair of Aug. 10 decisions rejecting the remand results in a case involving a scope ruling on door thresholds. Filed in response to the second CIT remands in cases involving two respective scope rulings that found the door thresholds from Columbia and Worldwide Door subject to antidumping and countervailing duties on aluminum extrusions from China, the remand redeterminations, filed under protest, only promise a future “revised scope ruling” if the trade court sustains. “Because it is not the actual scope ruling or determination Commerce plans to issue, it would not be self-effectuating should the court sustain it, and the agency decision that would follow if it were sustained would escape direct judicial review,” CIT said in the two nearly identical opinions.
The Court of International Trade was wrong to consider China's non-market economy status when analyzing whether to grant first sale treatment, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a Aug. 11 ruling. The decision overturns and remands a 2021 CIT ruling that said that first sale treatment shouldn't apply for cookware imported by Meyer from Thailand and China through a Chinese middleman because China is a NME.
The Court of International Trade will close out a controversial case involving allegations of antidumping and countervailing duty evasion by a Dominican exporter in the exporter’s favor, granting on Aug. 8 a motion to enter judgment sustaining CBP’s reversal of an evasion finding for Kingtom Aluminio in an Enforce and Protect Act investigation. Kingtom, several importers and the U.S. government had filed a joint motion requesting CBP’s remand results be sustained.
The Court of International Trade issued a decision Aug. 8 remanding surrogate value calculations in an antidumping review on activated carbon from China back to the Commerce Department for reconsideration or explanation. While CIT sustained five of the seven surrogate selections at issue in the case, it found the agency failed to explain its surrogate value selection of a dataset for carbonized material and its pick of a company for determining surrogate financial ratios.
The Court of International Trade on Aug. 8 sustained the Commerce’s Department’s third remand results in an case that revolved around the constructed value calculation in an antidumping duty review on steel nails from Oman. The trade court found Commerce justified its switch on remand between surrogate companies, despite calls from the exporter under review to use a different company.
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.