Jacob Kopnick

The Commerce Department properly decided not to reopen the record to inflate Mexican surrogate wage data and ultimately choose Brazilian wage data in the antidumping duty investigation on beer kegs from China, the Court of International Trade said. Sustaining Commerce's third remand results in the case, Judge M. Miller Baker said the agency reasonably said it was "unnecessary to reopen the record to inflate the Mexican wage figures" when the Brazilian data "suited the agency's purposes."

Maliha Khan, a former Commerce Department compliance analyst, has joined Schagrin Associates as an associate attorney, the firm announced. Khan worked as an international trade compliance analyst in Commerce's International Trade Administration from 2016 to 2020, then joined Kelley Drye as a trade attorney.

No lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade.

CBP failed to consider material evidence when it found that importer Scioto Valley Woodworking didn't evade the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on wooden cabinets and vanities from China, the Court of International Trade said in a decision made public last week. Judge Lisa Wang said CBP didn't sufficiently consider evidence of the Haiyan Group's ownership of Scioto and its affiliated supplier, Alno, and it didn't adequately discuss the contents of an additional warehouse disclosed by Alno.

Two Dominican nationals were sentenced to two years in prison and then two years of supervised release for smuggling juvenile American eels from Puerto Rico, DOJ announced. Saul Enrique Jose De la Cruz was sentenced on Nov. 21, and Simon De la Cruz Paredes was sentenced earlier this month.

The World Trade Organization's dispute settlement body on Nov. 25 agreed to establish a dispute settlement panel to review Colombia's compliance with an earlier ruling finding its antidumping duties on frozen fries from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands violated WTO rules (see 2411140017).

The EU on Nov. 24 formally requested dispute settlement consultations at the World Trade Organization regarding China's antidumping duties on EU brandy imports. China has 10 days to respond to the request to find a mutually convenient format and date for the talks.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit scheduled oral argument for the massive litigation involving thousands of companies against the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 China tariffs. The argument will be held Jan. 8 at 10 a.m. EST in Courtroom 203 (HMTX Industries v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1891).

The Court of International Trade in a confidential decision Nov. 22 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in the 2017-18 review of the antidumping duty order on aluminum foil from China. In the case, exporter Jiangsu Zhongji Lamination Materials and the U.S. disagreed on selections for world benchmark prices for an input and for land purchases (see 2410280038). The exporter preferred an input price benchmark that was a composite of GlobalTrade Atlas data and Commodities Research Unit data, while Commerce went with Trade Data Monitor data (Jiangsu Zhongji Lamination Materials Co. v. U.S., CIT # 21-00133).

The U.S. defended the methodology it used to calculate the amount of supplier subsides attributable to exporters Les Produits Forestiers D&G and its cross-owned affiliates, led by Les Produits Forestiers Portbec, on remand in a case on the expedited countervailing duty review of Canadian softwood lumber. Filing remand comments on Nov. 15, the government said two alternative methodologies floated by the petitioner, the Committee Overseeing Action for Lumber International Trade Investigations or Negotiations, both fall short (Committee Overseeing Action for Lumber International Trade Investigations or Negotiations v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 19-00122).