Any plaintiff in the massive Section 301 litigation looking to dismiss their case must comply with the court's rules to file a stipulation of dismissal signed by all parties who have appeared in the case, the Court of International Trade said in a text-only order. The court clarified that this rule, USCIT Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii), applies in the present action since the U.S. filed a Master Answer in the overarching test case, meaning the answer is considered to be filed in each Section 301 case "now pending or hereafter filed" in the court. Certain companies have begun dismissing their challenges to the China tariffs following the trade court's ruling that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not violate the law when implementing them (see 2303170063) (In Re Section 301 Cases, CIT # 21-00052).
The Court of International Trade on May 22 upheld the Commerce Department's finding that both Guizhou Tyre Co. (GTC) and Double Coin Holdings failed to rebut the presumption of Chinese government control in the antidumping duty investigation on truck and bus tires from China. Despite Commerce's "inartful and internally-inconsistent approach" to the question of whether a company majority-owned by a government entity could ever prove to be free of government control, Judge Timothy Stanceu said the agency did enough to show that Double Coin did not pick its managers independently of the government-owned shareholder.
The Court of International Trade appeared in a May 22 decision to sympathize with the idea that the Commerce Department should have taken into account a cooperative China-wide exporter's own data to recalculate the China-wide rate in an antidumping review, but ultimately the court declined to remand for a recalculation because the exporter had requested a remand to make it a separate rate respondent, not to review the China-wide entity.
The following lawsuit was recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
Importer Seneca Foods Corp. asked the Court of International Trade to hold oral argument in its suit on the Commerce Department's denials of the company's Section 232 exclusion requests for tin mill products. Seneca said that oral argument is "appropriate" since resolution of the matter is "important to Seneca and its business operations" and "presents important questions about the manner in which Commerce administers the Section 232 tariff exclusion process as a whole." Oral argument would allow for a "deeper analysis" of the key issues in the proceeding, the importer said. The government took no position on the motion (Seneca Foods Corp. v. United States, CIT # 22-00243).
The Court of International Trade recently upheld the Commerce Department's finding that exporter Shantou Red Garden Food Processing Co. (Shantou Processing) was not the successor-in-interest to Red Garden Food Processing Co. (Red Garden), which subjected the exporter to antidumping duties on frozen warmwater shrimp from China.
Turkish exporter Eregli Demir ve Celik Fabrikalari's complaint challenging the International Trade Commission's decision not to institute a changed circumstances review of the antidumping duty order on hot-rolled steel flat products from Turkey should be dismissed because it's moot after the ITC subsequently decided to conduct a sunset review, the U.S. and five U.S. steel companies led by Cleveland-Cliffs argued in a pair of briefs (Eregli Demir ve Celik Fabrikalari v. U.S. International Trade Commission, CIT # 22-00350).
The Commerce Department did not offer any source to justify its use of 24 working days per month as part of its surrogate value calculation for labor in an antidumping review, the Court of International Trade ruled. Remanding parts and sustaining parts of the seventh administrative review of the AD order on multilayered wood flooring from China, Judge Richard Eaton also sent back Commerce's surrogate financial ratio calculation for manufacturing overhead. Eaton did uphold the surrogate value determination for glue, however.
A company unable to prove it has any entries for the purposes of obtaining a separate rate should not automatically be found to have no shipments and be rescinded from the review, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in a May 19 opinion. Though the appellate court found the government's claim that it is not required to rescind a review for a company with no entries unconvincing, Judges Timothy Dyk, Richard Linn and Raymond Chen said that Ningbo Qixin did not clear the bar for establishing no shipments, even though Commerce had rejected a separate rate for the company because it couldn't verify any entries.
The Court of International Trade acted on its own initiative to order a "sua sponte" stay in a case on whether the Commerce Department lawfully found that Australian exporter BlueScope Steel (AIS) did not reimburse its affiliate BlueScope Steel Americas (BSA) for antidumping duties on imports of hot-rolled steel flat products. Judge Richard Eaton said the case, which concerns the third administrative review of the AD order on these products from Australia, shares an identical issue with the U.S. Steel Corp. v. U.S. case, which deals with the second administrative review of the same AD order. "That is, the sole issue in the prior U.S. Steel Corp. case was the reimbursement of antidumping duties -- one of two issues in the present case," Eaton said (U.S. Steel Corp. v. United States, CIT # 21-00528).