A recent False Claims Act case brought over unpaid marking duties on imports of Mifeprex, the active ingredient for the abortion pill mifepristone, was filed by the Life Legal Defense Foundation in a bid to "take some gold out of Egypt," the foundation's lawyer Catherine Short told Trade Law Daily. "This company is making drugs that kill babies, and we were able to cut away some of their profit from that," Short said.
Country of origin cases
The Commerce Department dropped the antidumping duty rate for three separate rate respondents in the administrative review of the 2016-17 AD duty order on diamond sawblades and parts thereof from China. Submitting its remand results to the Court of International Trade, Commerce cut the rates from 82.05% to 41.03% following separate litigation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Bosun Tools Co. v. U.S. (Danyang Weiwang Tools Manufacturing Co. v. U.S., CIT # 19-00006).
Danco Laboratories, a New York-based pharmaceutical distributor, will pay $765,000 to settle allegations it violated the False Claims Act by failing to pay marking duties on its imports of Mifeprex, the active ingredient for the abortion pill mifepristone, that lacked country of origin markings, DOJ announced April 12.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated April 13 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
The Commerce Department stuck by its decision to find that importer SMA Surface's Twilight product does not qualify for the crushed glass surface products exclusion under the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on quartz surface products from China, in remand results submitted to the Court of International Trade on April 12. Commerce said that since SMA Surfaces submitted pictures of only a part of its Twilight slab, it was not able to verify that the product meets the criteria of the exclusion, which requires that there be a one centimeter glass piece within three inches of another one centimeter glass piece across the surface of the product (SMA Surfaces v. United States, CIT # 21-00399).
The Court of International Trade on April 11 ordered the Commerce Department to redo parts of an antidumping duty administrative review on glycine from Japan. Judge Stephen Vaden remanded the final results of the review to Commerce for the agency to reconsider its decision that the "compensation for payment expense" was properly categorized as a general and administrative expense. The judge sustained Commerce's decision to use generally accepted accounting principles-compliant research and development cost records instead of trial balances was supported by law, as well as the agency's finding that respondent Nagase waited too long in finding its own assessment rate error.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
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Australia will pause its World Trade Organization case against China on barley for three months while Beijing reviews its restrictions, Australia announced this week. China placed 80.5% duties on Australian barley in 2020. The parties recently carried out "constructive dialogue at all levels," leading to a three- to four-month reprieve in the WTO case, Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said April 11.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York: