Jacob Kopnick

In one of his first actions as a CIT judge, Chief Judge Mark Barnett was handed a case reassigned from one of the court’s senior judges at the time, Judge R. Kenton Musgrave. The case, involving a duty drawback claim from BP Oil Supply Company, was filed in July 2004 and had languished in the court for years. Lengthy briefing schedules and a million motions to extend later, it had been nearly a decade since the initial complaint had been filed.

The Court of International Trade should remand the Commerce Department's failure to meet its obligation to verify the information of mandatory respondent Shakti Forge Industries in an antidumping duty investigation on forged steel fittings from India, petitioner Bonney Forge Corporation, along with the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union, said in a July 22 reply brief. Commerce's use of facts otherwise available doesn't excuse the agency from its duty to verify and leads to "absurd results," Bonney Forge said (Bonney Forge Corporation et al. v. United States, CIT #20-03837).

A request from a group of four Chinese steel companies to dismiss a case in which the U.S. government alleged the group stole trade secrets was denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on July 26. The group, comprising Pangang Group Company (PGC) and three of its subsidiaries, is accused of stealing DuPont trade secrets for the production of titanium dioxide in violation of the Economic Espionage Act. In their motion to dismiss, the group claimed immunity from criminal prosecution under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), arguing that the group is an "instrumentality" of the Chinese government.

The U.S. is seeking more than $18 million from importer Crown Cork & Seal in a July 28 complaint filed in the Court of International Trade alleging that the company fraudulently misclassified its metal lid imports to skirt a 2.6% duty rate. The goods -- metal lids for food, beverage, household and consumer products -- are properly classified under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 8309.90.0000 and are dutiable at that 2.6% rate, the Department of Justice said. Instead, CCS attempted to classify its metal lid imports from Europe between 2004 and 2009 under HTS subheading 7326.90.1000, which has duty-free treatment (The United States v. Crown Cork & Seal, USA, Inc. et al., CIT #21-361).

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

The Commerce Department's use of Thai surrogate data in two antidumping administrative reviews of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells from China was not properly supported, the Court of International Trade said in two nearly identical July 28 decisions. Judge Claire Kelly, penning the opinions, sought to bring Commerce's practice in line with a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision that called unreasonable the agency's “bookend methodology” in selecting the surrogate data. Stopping short of instructing Commerce to cease its use of the Thai data, Kelly found that the agency's rationale was unsupported and remanded the surrogate value selection for further consideration or explanation.

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

The Commerce Department's use of a simple average to calculate a pooled standard deviation as part of the differential pricing analysis in an antidumping duty case was reasonable and permitted under the statute, the U.S. and Mid Continent Steel & Wire said in reply briefs to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Responding to the opening brief filed by the appellants, led by PT Enterprise, both the government and Mid Continent argued that the "academic literature" backed the use of simple averages and that PT's proposed method of weighing the averages cut against the science (Mid Continent Steel & Wire, Inc. v. United States, Fed. Cir. #21-1747).

A Court of International Trade case seeking Section 301 tariff exclusions for frozen tillapia fillets from China should be stayed until litigation is completed in the massive Section 301 litigation, the Department of Justice said in a July 26 motion to stay. The case, brought by Global Food Trading Corp., featured two protests on CBP's handling of the entries: one seeking reclassification of the fillets under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 0304.61.00 and another seeking the Section 301 exclusions under secondary subheading 9903.88.43. CBP approved the first protest but denied the second. DOJ now requests a stay of litigation over the second protest until a decision is reached and all appeals are concluded in the broader Section 301 challenge involving over 3,500 separate complaints. "It would be an inefficient use of the parties’ and the Court’s resources to litigate the defenses to the Second Cause of Action now, when the merits underlying plaintiff’s claim are being litigated in a separate proceeding, and have not yet come to finality," the motion said (Global Food Trading Corp. v. United States, CIT #21-00263).

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade: