Jacob Kopnick

The Court of International Trade allowed tomato exporters NS Brands and Naturesweet Invernaderos to intervene in a case challenging the 1996 antidumping duty investigation on Mexican tomatoes, despite the request for intervention coming five years too late. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves held that the exporters, collectively referred to as NatureSweet, showed good cause for intervention, due to the unorthodox nature of the appeal, and properly articulated the basis for its intervention.

President-elect Donald Trump will most likely either turn to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) or Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose his recently announced tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, said trade lawyers interviewed by Trade Law Daily. Though much remains unknown about how Trump will impose these tariffs, the president-elect may turn to the two broad statutes to impose the tariffs to accomplish his stated goals of curbing the flow of migrants and fentanyl into the U.S.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

The facilitator of the World Trade Organization dispute settlement reform talks told members at a Nov. 21 heads of delegation meeting to be "practical and flexible" in ramping up negotiations, the WTO said. With just two weeks to go before the final General Council meeting of 2024, Usha Dwarka-Canabady urged members to stay focused on restoring the dispute settlement system's functionality and not on creating a new system with "more onerous obligations."