CBP has released its March 13 Customs Bulletin (Vol. 58, No. 10). While it contains a recent court decision, no customs rulings are included.
A listing of recent Commerce Department antidumping and countervailing duty messages posted on CBP's website March 11, along with the case number(s) and CBP message number, is provided below. The messages are available by searching for the listed CBP message number at CBP's ADCVD Search page.
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
Ford Motor Company agreed to pay $365 million to settle allegations that it knowingly undervalued hundreds of thousands of cargo vans, DOJ announced. The settlement comes five years after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that CBP properly classified Ford's Transit Connect vehicles as cargo vans, dutiable at 25%, and not as passenger vans, dutiable at 2.5%.
The Commerce Department is amending the final results of an antidumping duty administrative review on steel nails from Oman (A-523-808) based on the final decision in a court case challenging those final results.
International Trade Commissioners grappled with how they should fulfill the administration's request for a report on the export competitiveness of the Bangladeshi, Indian, Cambodian, Indonesian and Pakistani apparel sectors over the last 11 years -- is it to uncover how those countries' successes could offer lessons to other developing countries that want to industrialize? Is the success of Bangladesh, which is near to crossing the threshold into a middle-income country largely on the strength of its garment sector, a country with an "unnatural and unfair advantage," because of its suppression of unions and wages, as the AFL-CIO's Eric Gottwald asserted?
Democrats that represent Michigan and Ohio, where Big 3 automakers' plants are concentrated, are asking that the Section 301 review hike tariffs on Chinese automakers. Section 301 tariffs already apply a 25% tariff, making the total duty for a Chinese auto 27.5%.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on March 7 said that importer RKW Klerks' net wraps products, used in a machine to bale harvested crops, are not "parts" of harvesting machinery under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Judges Richard Taranto, Raymond Chen and Tiffany Cunningham thus sided with CBP's classification of the products as "warp knit fabric," dutiable at 10% under HTS subheading 6005.39.00.
A listing of recent Commerce Department antidumping and countervailing duty messages posted on CBP's website March 6, along with the case number(s) and CBP message number, is provided below. The messages are available by searching for the listed CBP message number at CBP's ADCVD Search page.
A bipartisan bill has been introduced that would set country-by-country de minimis levels, instruct the administration to reconsider U.S. tariffs "with the focus on the principle of reciprocity" for most favored nation rates, and open a dialogue with Mexico and Canada on allowing Costa Rica and Uruguay to join USMCA.