Commerce Had Support to Begin OCTG From Argentina AD Investigation, Petitioners, DOJ Argue

The Commerce Department had sufficient domestic industry support to begin and complete an antidumping duty investigation on oil country tubular goods from Argentina, AD petitioners led by U.S. Steel said in a Sept. 22 reply brief at the Court of International Trade (Tenaris Bay City, Inc., et al. v. U.S., CIT # 22-00343).

The petitions themselves established sufficient support from the domestic OCTG industry, the petitioners argued. Commerce based its support analysis on production data provided by the petitioners and on other domestic producers. Given the lack of production data available, Commerce correctly relied on available domestic shipment data as a proxy. Commerce also calculated a second, more conservative estimate using export shipments for those domestic producers whose production data was unavailable. The agency reasonably found that the petitions were supported by the majority of domestic production, the petitioners said.

Despite Tenaris's arguments, Commerce relied on production data from the petitioners and a "well-known industry publication" in accordance with "established Commerce practice," the petitioners said. Tenaris's theory that market factors affected the base year was "not supported by empirical data." The petitioners said that Commerce was not required to poll domestic industry, which would have delayed initiation. Instead, the department correctly relied on data provided by the petitioners, they said.

Even if there wasn't enough industry support at the time of the filing of the petitions, there is still no need to nullify the investigations, because Commerce has the authority to voluntarily initiate AD investigations "whenever it has reason to believe that unfairly traded imports are causing material injury to a domestic industry," the petitioners argued. Because Commerce has the authority to self-initiate investigations and could have done so in the underlying proceeding, no industry report was even required to initiate a proceeding, the petitioners said.

In its own reply, DOJ echoed the arguments that Commerce lawfully estimated domestic OCTG production by relying on available data. In addition, DOJ argued that Commerce's decision not to poll domestic producers was lawful because polling is a requirement only if the petitions do not establish support of producers accounting for at least 50% of total production. "The express language of the statute directly contemplates the actions that Commerce took," DOJ said.

In its June motion for judgment, Tenaris argued that Commerce's investigation had insufficient industry support to permit its initiation, the issuance of the final determination, and the imposition of the AD order. "AD and CVD petitions must have the support of companies/workers constituting more than 50 percent of the industry expressing either support or opposition," Tenaris said when it brought the case in January (see 2301180047).