CIT Remands Vietnam Shrimp to ITA on Zeroing, Voluntary Respondents, Separate Rate Certs

Following the February 2008 - January 2009 AD administrative review of certain frozen warmwater shrimp from Vietnam, Vietnamese producer/exporters challenged the International Trade Administration’s use of zeroing in AD administrative reviews while having abandoned the practice in investigations, and multiple Vietnamese plaintiffs also challenged the ITA’s labor rate calculations; its surrogate values work-up and surrogate financial expense calculations; its denial of a request for revocation; and its rejection of a separate rate certification due to late filing.

The Court of International Trade remanded the review results to the ITA with instructions to provide further explanation for its use of zeroing in antidumping reviews but not investigations, consistent with recent decisions of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit . The CIT also ruled that the ITA’s decision not to review voluntary respondents (under 19 USC 1677m(a)) was based on an impermissible interpretation of the statute, and that the decision to reject an untimely submitted separate rate certification was an abuse of discretion. The court included both these issues in its remand.

The CIT affirmed as reasonable the ITA’s decisions to exclude Bangladesh-to-Bangladesh sales price data from surrogate value calculations, to employ multi-country averaging to determine surrogate labor wage rates, and to exclude one company’s financial statement and another company’s loading and unloading expenses from the calculation of surrogate financial ratios calculations.

(CIT Slip Op. 12-9, dated 01/18/12)