The Court of International Trade sustained Nov. 18 the Commerce Department's remand results in a case involving a scope revision in an antidumping and countervailing duty investigation on steel trailer wheels from China. After previously sustaining the scope revision itself but remanding the retroactive imposition of the duties on subject merchandise, Judge Gary Katzmann then sustained Commerce's redetermination after it dropped the retroactive duties.
The Commerce Department improperly rejected a first-in-first-out (FIFO) methodology used by an Indonesian mattress exporter to determine which of the exporter’s U.S. inventory to examine in an antidumping duty investigation on mattresses from Indonesia, the exporter said in a brief filed with the Court of International Trade Nov. 9.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a notice of noncompliance Nov. 15 to counsel for the U.S. government in a case involving Section 232 duties. The notice said only one attorney may serve as principal counsel for each party. Two Department of Justice attorneys, Stephen Tosini and Kyle Beckrich, currently are listed in the docket as counsel for the U.S., with both marked to receive notice. Tosini is listed as the lead counsel and Beckrich as the counsel of record. The Federal Circuit said that "a party's failure to timely file a corrected document curing all defects identified on this notice may result in this document being stricken (PrimeSource Building Products, Inc. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. , #21-2066).
The Commerce Department has the authority to modify the scope of an antidumping duty investigation in response to evidence of evasion to ensure that the ultimate order "provides an effective remedy," the Department of Justice argued in a Nov. 12 brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. DOJ also backed the actual scope decision at issue in the case itself, asserting it was based on substantial evidence that showed Chinese companies were planning to use the original crushed glass exclusion to evade Commerce's AD/CVD orders on quartz-glass product (M S International, Inc., et al. v. United States, Fed. Cir. #21-1679).
The Supreme Court of the U.S. may hear an appeal of the key Transpacific Steel LLC v. United States decision, seeing it as an opportunity to discuss the question of the extent to which Congress delegated tariff powers to the president, Julie Mendoza of Morris Manning, counsel to plaintiff-appellee Borusan Mannesmann, told Trade Law Daily. Having recently petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case, Mendoza said that having the case sit in front of the nation's highest court will also give her and her team a chance to argue that the most recent decision in the case runs afoul of the intelligible principle standard for delegation of powers to the president as it relates to Section 232.
The Court of International Trade again struck down the Trump administration's withdrawal of an exclusion from the Section 201 solar safeguard measures for bifacial solar panels, in its second opinion rejecting Trump administration's elimination of the exclusion as many days. Judge Gary Katzmann found that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative's exclusion withdrawal was an "arbitrary and capricious agency decision" and represented a move with no statutory authority. Just a day earlier, Katzmann ruled against a presidential proclamation attempting to withdraw the bifacial panel exclusion, which came as a direct response to the CIT's preliminary injunction in the case over the USTR's move.
The 1974 Trade Act “does not authorize” the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to increase the “original” Section 301 lists 1 and 2 tariffs on Chinese goods under the “circumstances present” in the lists 3 and 4A duties, argued Akin Gump lawyers for sample case plaintiffs HMTX Industries and Jasco Products, in their final written brief Nov. 15 at the Court of International Trade before the litigation moves to oral argument Feb. 1, 2022. HMTX and Jasco, plus the thousands of complaints their September 2020 lawsuit sparked, seek to get the lists 3 and 4A tariffs thrown out and the paid duties refunded with interest.
Transpacific Plaintiffs to Petition SCOTUS Over Decision Permitting Post-Deadline Section 232 Action
A key U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision that found that the president can impose greater Section 232 national security tariffs beyond the 105-day deadline for action laid out in the statute is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Transpacific Steel, Borusan Mannesmann and The Jordan International Company filed a petition Nov. 12 in an attempt to get the high court to side with the original Court of International Trade decision, which held that the president may not make such adjustments.
Dali Bagrou, of Alpharetta, Georgia, and owner of World Mining and Oil Supply, was sentenced to 51 months in prison accompanied by three years of supervised release for his role in a scheme to evade U.S. national security laws, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Georgia said. World Mining was sentenced to five years' probation.
CBP continued to find that Leco Supply Co. continued to evade antidumping and countervailing duties on wire hangers from Vietnam, after voluntarily requesting a remand from the Court of International Trade to reconsider the case. Submitting its results in a Nov. 10 filing at CIT, CBP included information not previously considered in its determination and also released revised public summaries of the business confidential information (BCI), in line with a recent CIT decision (Leco Supply, Inc. v. United States, CIT #21-00136).