The Commerce Department had to draw a line somewhere, and its use of a test to distinguish the production activities of producers and fabricators to determine industry support in antidumping duty and countervailing duty investigations on quartz surface products from India is in line with the law and prior court precedent, DOJ said in a reply brief filed April 6 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

The Commerce Department's finding that two EU agriculture subsidies -- the Basic Payment Scheme and sustainable land use (Greening) payments -- are de jure specific is illegal and defies a key past court ruling, exporters Agro Sevilla Aceitunas and Angel Camacho Alimentacion said in an April 6 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Building off a case currently at the trade court in which the court held that these subsidies are not de jure specific, Agro Sevilla and Camacho also challenged Commerce's definitions of "prior stage product" and "latter stage product," among other things (Agro Sevilla Aceitunas S. Coop. v. United States, CIT #22-00106).

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The Court of International Trade remanded parts of the 2018 countervailing duty review on utility scale wind towers from Vietnam in a March 24 opinion made public April 4. Judge Timothy Reif sent the case back to the Commerce Department for it to address evidence submitted by the CVD petitioner Wind Tower Trade Coalition over alleged manipulation of the denominators used in the benefit calculation and to substantiate its conclusion that respondent CS Wind Vietnam didn't import its steel plate, thereby neglecting an import duty exemption subsidy.

The Commerce Department stuck by its use of the Cohen's d statistical test as part of its differential pricing analysis to detect "masked dumping" in antidumping proceedings, offering a more detailed explanation of the practice in April 4 remand results submitted to the Court of International Trade. Responding to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's remand on the issue, Commerce repeatedly stressed that certain statistical assumptions did not need to be true to properly run the test since the test measures the practical rather than the statistical significance of the data and Commerce has the entire population of data rather than just a sample (Stupp Corp. v. United States, CIT #15-00334).

The unanimous three-judge opinion at the U.S. Court of International Trade remanding the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on April 1 for correcting deficiencies in the agency’s Administrative Procedure Act compliance extends the current litigation at least until mid-summer. The opinion, written by Chief Judge Mark Barnett and coming two months to the day after Feb. 1 oral argument was held (see 2202010059), gives USTR 90 days, to June 30, to respond to the remand order, and orders the plaintiffs and the government to submit a joint status report 14 days after that, including a proposed schedule on “the further disposition of this litigation.”

In its argument disputing the Commerce Department's conclusion that the company is de facto controlled by the Chinese government, exporter Zhejiang Machinery Import & Export Corp. is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to "fundamentally rewrite" this element of antidumping proceedings, the U.S. argued. In its reply to ZMC's opening brief, DOJ said ZMC's stance, if upheld, would shift the burden to Commerce and require the agency to affirmatively prove the existence of government control by a majority shareholder, when the appellate court has already established that this burden is the respondents' (Zhejiang Machinery Import & Export v. U.S., Fed. Cir. #21-2257).

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative “properly exercised its authority” under the Section 307 modification provisions of the 1974 Trade Act when it ordered the imposition of the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports, the Court of International Trade ruled in an April 1 opinion. Test-case plaintiffs HMTX Industries and Jasco Products, plus the more than 3,600 complaints that followed, sought to vacate the tariffs on grounds that lists 3 and 4A were unlawful without USTR launching a new Section 301 investigation.

The Court of International Trade should reject the U.S.'s motion to dismiss a case challenging the Commerce Department's denial of a request to issue a scope ruling since the motion is "factually and legally inaccurate," plaintiffs led by Zhejiang Yuhua Timber Co. said in an April 1 brief. The plaintiffs said that the U.S.'s position that jurisdiction would be established at the end of a changed circumstances review requested by the plaintiffs is "plainly without any factual basis and purely speculative" (Zhejiang Yuhua Timber Co. v. United States, CIT #21-00502).

The Court of International Trade remanded several elements of a case brought by Mexican exporter Building Systems de Mexico, in a March 21 opinion made public March 30 concerning the antidumping investigation into fabricated structural steel from Mexico covering entries in 2018. Judge Claire Kelly sent back elements of the Commerce Department's decision to use mandatory respondent Corey S.A.'s home market sales to explain why the agency rejected BSM's data for insufficient volume but relied on Corey's when it had less data, and to explain whether a particular sale was contracted for during the investigation period.