Commerce Sticks With AFA Usage and Separate Rate Margin on Xanthan Gum AD Remand

The Commerce Department stuck by its decision to apply adverse facts available to antidumping duty respondent Meihua along with its decisions not to rescind its review of Deosen Biochemical and not to recalculate a separate rate in spite of a court order to reconsider all three, in remand results filed with the Court of International Trade on June 27 (Meihua Group International (Hong Kong) v. U.S., CIT # 22-00069).

CIT had sent the antidumping case on xanthan gum from China back to Commerce in April, saying that AFA is warranted only in instances in which Commerce reasonably expected that a "more forthcoming response should have been made" and that Commerce failed to fulfill its obligation by notinforming Meihua of a deficiency in its submission or providing an opportunity to remedy the error before assigning the company a 154.07% AFA AD rate (see 2304200010).

Commerce said that the remand order did not reject Commerce’s ability to apply AFA to Meihua on remand. Instead, the order simply instructed Commerce to “reconsider" the application of AFA and contained no instructions preventing Commerce from continuing to apply the AFA rate. Commerce said that the company had "knowingly submitted inaccurate and false information to Commerce."

Timely disclosure would have meant that as soon as Meihua discovered the inaccuracies, it would have submitted them to Commerce. “'Timely' disclosure does not mean, as Meihua contends, withholding information relevant to Commerce’s analysis and margin calculations and belatedly divulging schemes under protest, and only after Commerce becomes aware of said schemes," Commerce said.

Because no interested party requested that Commerce conduct a collapsing analysis of Deosen Biochemical and Deosen (Ordos) Biochemical, the department properly followed its "long-standing practice" to continue to treat companies as collapsed when Commerce has determined to collapse them in a prior proceeding. Despite Deosen’s claims, Commerce said that it is not obligated, and has no reason, to conduct a collapsing analysis of a previously collapsed entity.

Jianlong had argued that its separate rate of 77.04% was not reasonably reflective of its dumping margin, which had never been above 9.3%. Commerce said that it must consider the dumping history of all separate rate companies. Deosen had received an AFA rate of 154.07% in two of the four times it was selected as a mandatory respondent. In addition, Commerce noted a lack of evidence as to Jianlong’s "actual selling experience in the United States." Absent that evidence, Commerce had only the previous margin history of all other separate rate companies to consider. Commerce justified its calculation by noting there is a history of dumping margins "both above and below the 77.04 percent separate rate applied in this administrative review."