The Commerce Department properly held that three companies owned by the same, although estranged, family are not affiliated for purposes of collapsing the entities in an antidumping case, the Court of International Trade said in an Aug. 20 opinion. The agency's contention that the companies did not clear any of the three standards for collapsing multiple companies for purposes of calculating a dumping margin was proper, Judge Gary Katzmann ruled.

There’s been a steady recent uptick in the volume of Section 301 complaints at the Court of International Trade, but lawyers with active cases told us they're not sure if that has anything to do with the two-year anniversary of the Federal Register notice on Aug. 20, 2019, that put the List 4A tariffs into effect on Sept. 1, 2019, on goods from China. All the roughly 3,800 complaints inundating the court, and counting, seek to vacate the lists 3 and 4A tariffs and get the paid tariffs refunded on grounds that the duties are unlawful under the 1974 Trade Act and violate 1930 Administrative Procedure Act protections against sloppy rulemakings.

The Court of International Trade consolidated six challenges to the Commerce Department's denials of Section 232 steel and aluminum exclusion requests in an Aug. 17 order. Judge M. Miller Baker said the cases brought by North American Interpipe, Evraz Inc., Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, AM/NS Calvert, California Steel Industries and Valbruna Slater Stainless will be jointly considered for the "limited purpose of resolving the motions to remand."

A Commerce Department regulation establishing expedited reviews for countervailing duty investigations was vacated in an Aug. 18 opinion from the Court of International Trade. Chief Judge Mark Barnett penned his fourth opinion in the case, upholding Commerce's finding that it couldn't find any alternative statutory basis on which to find that the regulation can exist.

The Court of International Trade created an “impermissible distinction” under customs valuation law between goods from non-market and market economies when it denied importer Meyer Corp. first sale valuation, the importer argued in an Aug. 9 opening brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Kicking off litigation in the much-anticipated appeal proceedings, Meyer argued against the alleged impermissibility of CIT's first sale rejection and for its qualifications for the special valuation status (Meyer Corporation, U.S. v. United States, Fed. Cir. #21-1932).

The U.S.' voluntary remand request in two Section 232 exclusion cases should be denied in its current form since the government's delayed, tranched solution is "unconscionable," steel importers Allegheny Technologies Inc. and California Steel Industries argued in an Aug. 16 reply brief. Given that Section 232 steel and aluminum tariff exclusion requests are supposed to be decided within 106 days, the Commerce Department's proposed nine to 12 month schedule to reconsider CSI's exclusion requests is "unreasonable" with a "nonsensical" rationale, CSI argued (Allegheny Technologies Incorporated et al. v. U.S., CIT #20-03923)(California Steel Industries, Inc. v. U.S., CIT #21-00015).

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Antidumping petitioner U.S. Steel Corporation and the two mandatory respondents in the contested antidumping duty review, SeAH Steel Co. and NEXTEEL Co., submitted their comments on the Commerce Department's remand results at the Court of International Trade. U.S. Steel spoke out against Commerce's flip on its finding of a particular market situation for South Korean steel while the respondents argued against the agency's reallocation of suspended product line and inventory valuation losses to general and administrative expenses and Commerce's decision to deduct a portion of SeAH's G&A expenses of a U.S. affiliate for further manufacturing costs (SeAH Steel Co. v. United States, CIT #19-00086).

The Commerce Department properly calculated antidumping duty review mandatory respondent LG Chem's cost of production (COP) when calculating constructed price, the Court of International Trade said in an Aug. 13 opinion. In a case over the antidumping duty investigation into acetone from South Korea, Judge M. Miller Baker held that Commerce's decision to spurn LG Chem's method for calculating the cost of the materials for making acetone in favor of the method used by the other mandatory respondent, Kumho P&B Chemical, was legal. This decision led to a higher antidumping rate for LG Chem in the investigation's final determination, sticking the exporter with a 25.05% rate. Baker also found that Commerce's rejection of certain of LG Chem's factual submissions was "harmless" and therefore permitted.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit should find that pencil importer Prime Time Commerce did not exhaust its administrative remedies by failing to comment on the Commerce Department's remand results in the Court of International Trade, the Department of Justice told the appellate court. Despite its five attempts to obtain “gap-filling” information necessary to determine the correct antidumping rate in an administrative review, Prime Time did not comment on the case's remand results, meaning the importer stands in violation of the exhaustion doctrine that precludes judicial review, DOJ said in its reply brief (Prime Time Commerce, LLC v. U.S., Fed. Cir. #21-1783).