Kitchenware retailer Williams-Sonoma agreed to pay $3.2 million in civil penalties and "stop making false and misleading claims about the origins of its products," settling a lawsuit brought in a California court, DOJ announced. The agency alleged that Williams-Sonoma violated a Federal Trade Commission administrative order barring the company from advertising wholly imported goods and goods containing "significant imported content" as being "Made in the USA" (U.S. v. Williams-Sonoma, N.D. Cal. # 24-02396).
The World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body met on April 26 and was introduced to the new facilitator of the dispute settlement reform talks: Mauritius's Usha Dwarka-Canabady, the WTO announced. The chair of the DSB, Norway's Petter Olberg, said that Dwarka-Canabady accepted the role on April 18 after the "convenor" of the reform process left.
The statute on deemed liquidation for drawback claims "doesn't make sense as written," Judge Jane Restani said during April 18 oral arguments at the Court of International Trade. She said that both importer Performance Additives and the government are "adding terms to the statutes that aren't there," but said she understands because "none of this can work if we just read the words that are there" (Performance Additives v. United States, CIT # 22-00044).
Thai exporter Sahamitr Pressure Container is challenging the Commerce Department's decision to reclassify certain cylinders as outside the scope of the antidumping duty order on steel propane cylinders from Thailand as part of its model match methodology. In its complaint, filed at the Court of International Trade April 24, Sahamitr also challenged Commerce's use of the Cohen's d test to detect "masked" dumping in the 2021-22 review of the AD order (Sahamitr Pressure Container v. U.S., CIT # 24-00064).
The Court of International Trade on April 24 sustained CBP's finding on remand that importer Columbia Aluminum Products didn't evade the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China. But Judge Timothy Stanceu rejected Columbia's claim that CBP needed to immediately terminate the interim measures issued under the Enforce and Protect Act after reversing its original evasion finding.
The Court of International Trade on April 22 sent back the Commerce Department's decision not to attribute subsidies received by lumber suppliers to respondents in an expedited countervailing duty review on Canadian softwood lumber. Judge Mark Barnett said that if Commerce continues to find that the respondents are the producers of the subject lumber, the agency must reconsider its decision to require an upstream subsidy allegation for lumber purchases within the class of covered merchandise.
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