The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
Section 1581(i) Jurisdiction Stands in Liquidation Instruction Challenge, Solar Cell Importer Argues
The Department of Justice's motion to dismiss a challenge to the Commerce Department's liquidation instructions to CBP over MS Solar's solar panels is "nothing more than an effort to avoid judicial scrutiny of its arbitrary and unreasonable actions," MS Solar said in a Nov. 23 brief to the Court of International Trade. The solar panel importer urged the court to accept jurisdiction under the court's Section 1581(i) "residual" jurisdiction provision (MS Solar Investments, LLC v. United States, CIT #21-00303).
The European Court of Justice dismissed an appeal brought by Iranian company Fulmen that sought greater damage payments than had previously been awarded to it by the EU General Court. In a recent judgment, the ECJ said that the General Court was right to find that Fulmen hadn't established a sufficient link between its designation and the alleged damaged suffered, and that other reasons could explain the dip in its market shares. Further, the court said that the General Court sufficiently backed its reasons for determining the level of compensation that it did.
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Dec. 1 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 must reconsider its use of an adverse inference in an antidumping review on Italian pasta since it failed to find out whether a respondent did not to cooperate to the best of its ability, the Court of International Trade said in a Nov. 30 opinion. However, the court upheld the remaining elements of the decision, including Commerce's use of facts available and the agency's rejection of the respondent's post-verification arguments for different classification systems for the pasta's protein content and shape.
Royal Brush Manufacturing, Inc. will appeal an October Court of International Trade opinion that upheld CBP's finding that it evaded antidumping duties on cased pencils from China, according to a Nov. 29 notice of appeal. The pencil importer will appeal the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. CIT originally remanded the case to CBP after finding that the customs agency did not provide adequate public summaries of business confidential information during the evasion investigation. Chief Judge Mark Barnett then upheld the evasion determination after finding that CBP cleared this hurdle and that the summaries did not violate Royal Brush's due process rights (see 2111010036) (Royal Brush Manufacturing, Inc. v. United States, CIT #19-00198).
Since a steel importer's and purchaser's bid to reliquidate two entries subject to Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs is virtually identical to its already dismissed action seeking the same thing, it should be dismissed, the Department of Justice argued in a Nov. 24 brief at the Court of International Trade. The new case, brought by the importer, Voestalpine USA, and the purchaser, Bilstein Cold Rolled Steel, which challenges the Commerce Department's Section 232 exclusion, is "legally indistinguishable" from its prior case, and, as such, is moot, the U.S. said (Voestalpine USA Corp., et al. v. United States, CIT #21-00290).
The Department of Justice removed Stephen Tosini as its principal counsel in a case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit involving Section 232 duties and replaced him with Meen Geu Oh, according to a Nov. 22 motion for leave to file an amended entry of appearance. The motion was then approved the following day by the court. DOJ said that Tosini "has just commenced a detail with another component within the Justice Department," and thus could not continue to serve as lead counsel in the case (PrimeSource Building Products, Inc. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. , #21-2066).
The antidumping and countervailing duties that importer Fedmet Resources now has to pay as a result of a CBP duty evasion ruling amounts to an "embargo" and deprives Fedmet of market access, the importer argued in a Nov. 19 brief at the Court of International Trade. Further, CBP violated Fedmet's due process rights by not even notifying the importer of the existence of the investigation until the interim measures were put in place and not giving it an opportunity to respond to evidence against it, the brief said (Fedmet Resources Corporation v. United States, CIT #21-00248).