The Commerce Department violated the law by hitting consolidated antidumping duty respondents Apiario Diamante Comercial Esportadora and Apiario Diamante Producao e Comercial de Mel (collectively Supermel) with total adverse facts available, the respondent argued in a July 27 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Commerce unlawfully used unaffiliated beekeepers to verify Supermel's data, despite the fact that Supermel was the mandatory respondent and not the beekeepers, the complaint said (Apiario Diamante Comercial Exportadora Ltda. v. United States, CIT #22-00185).

The Department of Commerce made multiple errors in calculating the duty margin in an administrative review of the antidumping duty order on antifriction bearings from China, Tainai said in a July 26 motion at the Court of International Trade (Shanghai Tainai Bearing Co., Ltd. and C&U Americans, LLC v United States, CIT #22-0038).

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The country of origin of certain surgical gowns imported by Global Resources International and Santé USA is the Dominican Republic and not the U.S. for the purposes of government procurement, CBP said in a final determination. Since the most important assembly or manufacturing processes in the production of the gowns took place in the Dominican Republic and not the U.S., the country of origin is the Dominican Republic, CBP said. The agency then directed the importers to consult with the relevant government procuring agency to find whether the gowns qualify as "U.S.-made end products" for the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

The Court of International Trade ruled that the U.S. can't file a counterclaim in a customs case brought by Second Nature Designs, according to a July 25 order by Judge Gary Katzmann (Second Nature Designs v. U.S., CIT #21-00271).

The Court of International Trade should circumvent the remand process and order the Commerce Department to grant exclusions to Section 232 steel and aluminum duties, steel company NLMK Pennsylvania argued in a July 22 brief. Likening its experience with the exclusion process at Commerce to "a bad remake of Groundhog Day," the plaintiff argued that Commerce has repeatedly ignored the record evidence which plainly shows that the U.S. companies do not have the capacity to fill NLMK's requests (NLMK Pennsylvania v. United States, CIT #21-00507).

The U,S, Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit needs to reconsider its dismissal of a broad challenge to President Donald Trump's Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs, plaintiff-appellants in the case, led by USP Holdings, argued in a July 22 motion for reconsideration. The plaintiff-appellants said that the court "failed to consider" the effect of the Administrative Procedure Act on the standard of review issue when finding that the scope of judicial review given to the Commerce Secretary's determination of threat to impair national security was identical to that given to the president, whose findings are not subject to the APA (USP Holdings v. United States, Fed. Cir. #21-1726).

Zhe "John" Liu and GL Paper Distribution owe the U.S. nearly $1 million for evading antidumping duties on steel wire hangers from China by transshipping the wire hangers through Malaysia, the U.S. argued in a July 21 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Alleging that Liu and GL Paper negligently avoided paying the duties, the U.S. took to the trade court to seek payment of the penalties, which equals the domestic value of the steel wire hanger entries made by GL Paper in 2017 (The United States v. Zhe "John" Liu, CIT #22-00215).

The Commerce Department in July 20 remand results submitted to the Court of International Trade stuck by its methodology used to calculate profit for the constructed value of antidumping duty respondent Building Systems de Mexico (BSM). Commerce also dropped the use of adverse facts available for one unreportable sale, used the date of substantial completion of a fabricated structural steel (FSS) project as the date of sale rather than the date of the purchase order or sales order acknowledgment, and didn't exclude the operating results of the business unit in question from the calculation of the constructed export price profit rate (Building Systems de Mexico v. U.S., CIT #20-00069).

The Court of International Trade in a July 20 opinion redenominated the U.S.'s counterclaim in a customs case brought by importer Cyber Power Systems as a defense, ruling that the U.S. does not have the statutory authority to make the counterclaim. With the ruling, Judge Claire Kelly denied Cyber Power's motion to dismiss the counterclaim as moot. Kelly ruled that none of the sections in the U.S. code cited by the U.S. give a basis for the counterclaim, which sought to reclassify imported cables.