Jacob Kopnick

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

The Commerce Department's use of Thai surrogate data in two antidumping administrative reviews of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells from China was not properly supported, the Court of International Trade said in two nearly identical July 28 decisions. Judge Claire Kelly, penning the opinions, sought to bring Commerce's practice in line with a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision that called unreasonable the agency's “bookend methodology” in selecting the surrogate data. Stopping short of instructing Commerce to cease its use of the Thai data, Kelly found that the agency's rationale was unsupported and remanded the surrogate value selection for further consideration or explanation.

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

The Commerce Department's use of a simple average to calculate a pooled standard deviation as part of the differential pricing analysis in an antidumping duty case was reasonable and permitted under the statute, the U.S. and Mid Continent Steel & Wire said in reply briefs to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Responding to the opening brief filed by the appellants, led by PT Enterprise, both the government and Mid Continent argued that the "academic literature" backed the use of simple averages and that PT's proposed method of weighing the averages cut against the science (Mid Continent Steel & Wire, Inc. v. United States, Fed. Cir. #21-1747).

The Commerce Department should have disregarded petitioners' claims in a countervailing duty investigation on silicon metal from Kazakhstan, said sole respondent to the investigation Tau-Ken Temir in a July 21 brief in the Court of International Trade. The petitioners' conflict of interest claim "lacked merit, not even colorable merit," to the extent that Commerce should have found the petitioners were interfering in the investigation, TKT said. The exporter seeks to have the court throw out Commerce's rejection of its questionnaire responses (Tau-Ken Temir LLP et al. v. United States, CIT #21-00173).

A Court of International Trade case seeking Section 301 tariff exclusions for frozen tillapia fillets from China should be stayed until litigation is completed in the massive Section 301 litigation, the Department of Justice said in a July 26 motion to stay. The case, brought by Global Food Trading Corp., featured two protests on CBP's handling of the entries: one seeking reclassification of the fillets under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 0304.61.00 and another seeking the Section 301 exclusions under secondary subheading 9903.88.43. CBP approved the first protest but denied the second. DOJ now requests a stay of litigation over the second protest until a decision is reached and all appeals are concluded in the broader Section 301 challenge involving over 3,500 separate complaints. "It would be an inefficient use of the parties’ and the Court’s resources to litigate the defenses to the Second Cause of Action now, when the merits underlying plaintiff’s claim are being litigated in a separate proceeding, and have not yet come to finality," the motion said (Global Food Trading Corp. v. United States, CIT #21-00263).

Changi Esquel Textile (CJE), a Hong Kong-based apparel company and part of the Esquel group of companies, filed for a preliminary injunction on July 19 against its placement on the Commerce Department's Entity List. The company is seeking the injunction even though it expects an announcement soon on potential changes to its status on the list, it said. "The government has informed Plaintiffs that there will likely be a development regarding CJE’s continued Entity List designation by August 1," the company said.

Greenlight Organic accused the U.S. government of invoking various "evasive tactics" in avoiding providing sufficient answers to the company's requests for admissions (RFAs) in a Court of International Trade case over the importer's alleged misclassification of imports to skirt duties. In a July 23 motion to compel the U.S. to respond to Greenlight's 116 RFAs, the importer wants the court to force the government to issue responses and overturn its objections that the requests were "incoherent and prevented a meaningful response" (United States v. Greenlight Organic, Inc. et al., CIT #17-00031).

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade: