Jacob Kopnick

The Commerce Department should have disregarded petitioners' claims in a countervailing duty investigation on silicon metal from Kazakhstan, said sole respondent to the investigation Tau-Ken Temir in a July 21 brief in the Court of International Trade. The petitioners' conflict of interest claim "lacked merit, not even colorable merit," to the extent that Commerce should have found the petitioners were interfering in the investigation, TKT said. The exporter seeks to have the court throw out Commerce's rejection of its questionnaire responses (Tau-Ken Temir LLP et al. v. United States, CIT #21-00173).

Changi Esquel Textile (CJE), a Hong Kong-based apparel company and part of the Esquel group of companies, filed for a preliminary injunction on July 19 against its placement on the Commerce Department's Entity List. The company is seeking the injunction even though it expects an announcement soon on potential changes to its status on the list, it said. "The government has informed Plaintiffs that there will likely be a development regarding CJE’s continued Entity List designation by August 1," the company said.

Greenlight Organic accused the U.S. government of invoking various "evasive tactics" in avoiding providing sufficient answers to the company's requests for admissions (RFAs) in a Court of International Trade case over the importer's alleged misclassification of imports to skirt duties. In a July 23 motion to compel the U.S. to respond to Greenlight's 116 RFAs, the importer wants the court to force the government to issue responses and overturn its objections that the requests were "incoherent and prevented a meaningful response" (United States v. Greenlight Organic, Inc. et al., CIT #17-00031).

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

The Labor Department continued to find that a unionized group of former AT&T call center employees are not entitled to trade adjustment assistance for outsourced jobs in July 22 remand results filed in the Court of International Trade. On May 4, the court remanded the case to the agency after Judge M. Miller Baker found that Labor failed to discuss or even reference the union's evidence of why the trade adjustment case was warranted in its determination (see 2105040032) (Communications Workers of America Local 4123, on behalf of Former Employees of AT&T Services, Inc. v. United States Secretary of Labor, CIT #20-00075).

The Commerce Department will review whether Russia is a non-market economy for antidumping duty purposes as part of a less-than-fair-value investigation into urea ammonium nitrate from the country, Commerce said in a notice initiating the investigation. Domestic producer CF Industries Nitrogen and its subsidiaries alleged that Russia was a nonmarket economy in the petition underlying the investigation.

The Commerce Department was wrong to "jettison" its prior regulations in not adjusting for the indirect reimbursement for antidumping duties paid in an administrative review on hot-rolled steel flat products from Australia, the U.S. Steel Corporation said in a July 13 reply brief. Responding to arguments made by Commerce and defendant-intervenor BlueScope Steel, U.S. Steel argued that the scope of Commerce's reimbursement regulation includes both direct and indirect reimbursement, which runs counter to Commerce's decision to not adjust for indirect reimbursement.

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

In dueling briefs filed to the Court of International Trade in a case over the president's decision to reverse a safeguard exemption on bifacial solar panels, the Department of Justice and plaintiffs led by the Solar Energy Industries Association argued over whether a recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit opinion is relevant to their case. The decision, Transpacific Steel LLC et al. v. U.S., found that the president could hike Section 232 national security tariffs beyond time limits imposed by the statute (see 2107130059). DOJ in its brief said that the decision lends itself to ruling in the government's favor in the case of the solar panels. SEIA said that the decision has "little relevance" to its case since the decision deals with "an entirely different statute," in its letter (Solar Energy Industries Association et al. v. United States, CIT #29-03941).

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