The Commerce Department continued to apply countervailing duties for China’s Export Buyer’s Credit Program to two Chinese wooden cabinet exporters in remand results submitted to the Court of International Trade Aug. 5, despite a court-ordered effort by the agency to validate non-use of the program without information withheld by the Chinese government.

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The Court of International Trade issued a decision Aug. 8 remanding surrogate value calculations in an antidumping duty review on activated carbon from China to the Commerce Department for reconsideration or explanation. While CIT sustained five of the seven surrogate selections at issue in the case, it found the agency failed to explain its surrogate value selection of a dataset for carbonized material and its pick of a company for determining surrogate financial ratios.

The Court of International Trade on Aug. 8 sustained the Commerce’s Department’s third remand results in an case that revolved around the constructed value calculation in an antidumping duty administrative review on steel nails from Oman. The trade court found Commerce justified its switch on remand between surrogate companies, despite calls from the exporter under review to use a different company.

CBP affirmed a February determination that found substantial evidence of evasion of countervailing duties and antidumping duties on wooden cabinets from China by two importers, after a review of the case, according to a recently released notice.

The U.S.'s "unreasonable delay" in asserting claims seeking to collect antiduming duties on entries of canned mushrooms brought in between 2000 and 2001 warrants dismissal of its case at the Court of International Trade seeking the duties, surety company American Home Assurance Co. (AHAC) argued in an Aug. 1 reply brief. Responding to the court's request for more briefing over AHAC's affirmative defense and claims of prejudice, the surety company said that it has not been able to actually provide significant evidence of actual harm "despite best efforts," but that the case should be decided on statute of limitations grounds (United States v. American Home Assurance Company, CIT #20-00175).

The Court of International Trade in an Aug. 4 order denied defendant Greenlight Organic and Parambir Singh Aulakh's motion for summary judgment over the date that the U.S. discovered customs fraud for the purpose of finding whether the statute of limitations had run out. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves ruled that the undisputed facts don't back any of three dates floated by the defendants as the date that the U.S. first received evidence of Greenlight's double invoicing scheme. In the scheme, Greenlight is accused of fraudulently misclassifying its Vietnam-origin knit garments.

The Commerce Department cannot deduct Section 232 national security duties from antidumping duty respondent Borusan Mannesman's U.S. price because the duties are remedial, temporary and deducting them would count as a double remedy, making them unlike normal customs duties, the respondent argued. Filing a reply brief Aug. 4 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the respondent said Commerce failed to conduct a "fulsome analysis" of whether the Section 232 duties are more like normal customs duties or to special duties, like Section 201 safeguards, and instead "confined its analysis" to finding distinctions between Section 232 and Section 201 duties. The agency also failed to acknowledge the "legal and constitutional distinction between regular duties imposed by Congress" and special duties imposed by the president (Borusan Mannesmann Boru Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. #21-2097).

The International Trade Commission erred in its determination that mattress imports injured the domestic industry and again when it argued in its defense at the Court of International Trade, importer CVB said in an August 1 brief at the Court of International Trade (CVB v. United States, CIT #21-00288).

The U.S., in a July 28 brief at the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, argued oral argument is needed in a case over alleged Jones Act penalties committed by shipping companies Kloosterboer International Forwarding and Alaska Reefer Management. The U.S. pushed back against KIF and ARM's opposition to oral argument, arguing that the meeting is needed to "fully vet the complex issues in this case" and fully inform the court about the record (Kloosterboer International Forwarding v. United States, D. Alaska #3:21-00198).