The Court of International Trade sustained on Oct. 27 the Commerce Department's second remand results in a case over the sixth administrative review of the antidumping duty order on diamond sawblades and parts thereof from China. Judge Claire Kelly upheld Commerce's use of adverse facts available when weighing respondent Bosun Tool's country of origin information using a first-in, first-out methodology, despite Bosun's full cooperation. Kelly also rejected Bosun's argument that if AFA were to be applied, the scope of its application should be limited to the missing country of origin information for the FIFO sales, holding instead that Commerce reasonably found that, without reliable country of origin information, the agency could not accurately pair price data in the U.S. sales database with the correct country of origin.

The Court of International Trade on Oct. 22 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in a case over the 11th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on activated carbon from China. Chief Judge Mark Barnett upheld Commerce's decision to pick Malaysia over Romania as the primary surrogate country in the review, despite the fact that Commerce used the financial statements from a Romanian company to calculate the surrogate financial ratios. Barnett also sustained Commerce's surrogate value selections for bituminous coal, an input of activated carbon, and the agency's financial ratio calculations.

The Court of International Trade on Oct. 22 remanded in part and sustained in part the Commerce Department's final determination in the antidumping duty investigation on utility scale wind towers from Canada. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves sustained Commerce's decision to weight-average plate costs, use respondent Marmen's invoice dates as the date of sale, use reported sales of tower sections and not apply facts otherwise available. The judge remanded, however, Commerce's decision to reject Marmen's additional cost reconciliation information and use the average-to-transaction methodology when identifying masked dumping.

The Court of International Trade issued two opinions in antidumping cases, one sustaining the Commerce Department's remand results, and another remanding certain issues back to the agency. The first decision concerned a challenge brought by Husteel to the 2016-17 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on circular welded non-alloy steel pipe from South Korea. As it has done many times before, the court had initially remanded Commerce's decision to make a particular market situation adjustment to Husteel's sales-below-cost test. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves said this adjustment is not permissible under the law, so Commerce dropped it under protest, leading the judge to sustain the remand.

The Court of International Trade ordered on Oct. 18 that the U.S. must serve amended answers to 25 of importer Greenlight Organic's requests for admission in a case over the importer's alleged misclassification of imports to skirt duties. Granting Greenlight's motion to compel in part and denying it in part, CIT said that the U.S. only has to respond to 25 of Greenlight's 116 RFAs. CIT found that the U.S. did not have to respond to a host of other RFAs related to the date of discovery of Greenlight's alleged fraud since RFAs are to be used to identify undisputed facts, and the date of discovery of the fraud is not undisputed, the court said.

The Court of International Trade granted the Justice Department's motion to stay a case challenging the expansion of Section 232 duties on steel and aluminum "derivatives," in an Oct. 14 order, due in part, to the defendant's likelihood of succeeding on appeal. A majority panel at CIT found in the case that President Donald Trump's 2018 decision to expand the Section 232 duties onto the derivative products was made beyond the 105-day deadline laid out in the Section 232 statute. The court now recognizes that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's decision in Transpacific Steel LLC, et al. v. U.S., permitting the president to take Section 232 tariff actions beyond procedural deadlines, indicates the DOJ's likelihood of succeeding in its appeal.

The Court of International Trade on Oct. 14 granted in part, and denied in part, the Justice Department's motion to extend the discovery period in a dispute over the tariff classification of electrical conduit. DOJ moved to extend the discovery period for over a month to take the deposition of an expert witness. Plaintiff Shamrock Building Materials argued that this extension would prejudice it and should be denied due to DOJ's lack of diligence.

The Court of International Trade on Oct. 12 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in the 14th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on certain frozen fish fillets from Vietnam. After previously remanding Commerce's application of adverse facts available for lack of substantial evidence, Judge Miller Baker sustained the AFA application after Commerce switched out the grounds on which it based its AFA finding. Initially, Commerce applied AFA based on the respondent's reporting failures related to customer relationships and factors of production reporting issues, but now bases the finding to the respondent's failure to maintain source documents and control number reporting issues.

The Court of International Trade remanded the Commerce Department's final results in the administrative review of the countervailing duty order on certain passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China covering entries from 2017, in an Oct. 12 order. Commerce, as it has done many times before, applied adverse facts available relating to its inability to verify non-use of China's Export Buyer's Credit Program by the two mandatory respondents' U.S. customers. Judge Timothy Reif issued lengthy remand orders to Commerce, instructing the agency, for instance, to explain how one of the respondent's questionnaire statements showing its non-use of the program are unverifiable by describing Commerce's step-by-step methodology for verifying non-use.

Only district courts, not the Court of International Trade, have the jurisdiction to hear cases over property seized by CBP, CIT said in an Oct. 7 order. Dismissing a case brought by Root Sciences over its seized "drug paraphernalia," Judge Gary Katzmann said that since the seized goods were never deemed excluded, there was no protestable action by CBP, precluding jurisdiction at CIT. Katzmann also held that questions about CBP's lack of notice to Root about the seizure should be decided by district courts and not CIT.