Roller Bearings Manufacturer Challenges Antidumping Duty Rate at CIT

The Commerce Department arbitrarily and capriciously applied partial adverse facts available when calculating a final antidumping duty on tapered roller bearings, even though the missing information was irrelevant and could not be obtained from unrelated third parties, manufacturer Tainai said in a Feb. 21 complaint to the Court of International Trade (Shanghai Tainai Bearing v. U.S., CIT # 23-00020).

The suit contests Commerce's final results in the administrative review of the antidumping duty orders on tapered roller bearings from China. In the final results of the review, Commerce assigned an AD rate of 36.03% to Tainai based on partial AFA.

The complaint asks the court to remand the matter to Commerce for redetermination, and award it attorney fees and costs. Tainai said that the application of partial adverse facts available was incorrect because there was "no missing information," as the department valued inputs using surrogate values for finished inputs, meaning the actual production factors were irrelevant. Tainai also said the allegedly missing information that prompted the use of partial AFA was not appropriate because it belonged to "unrelated third parties," which refused to share information with Tainai.

Tainai also objected to Commerce's use of a financial statement for Timken Romania in calculating financial ratios. Because the "super-majority of transactions" were made with related parties, Tainai argued that the statement was "badly distorted and thus fatally flawed." If Commerce insisted on using Timken Romania ratios, it should also use other financial ratios from Compa S.A. and Rulmenti, Tainai said, arguing that [w]here multiple financial statement have flaws, using all of the financial statements decreases the impact of the flaws."

Commerce also valued certain components based on finished products despite the application of financial ratios to those products, which, Tainai said, resulted in double counting. Commerce omitted payments collected from customs for Section 301 duties that exceeded the amount of duties actually paid instead of properly including "all payments received." Finally, Commerce did not grant offsets for "readily identifiable valuable byproducts" of the roller bearing production process, Tainai said.