Commerce Gives Italian Forged Block Manufacturer Undue Leeway in AD Case, Petitioner Argues

The Commerce Department unlawfully miscalculated duty rates and allowed a foreign producer too much leeway in the final results of its first antidumping administrative review of forged steel fluid end blocks from Italy, petitioner Ellwood City Forge Co. said in an Oct. 13 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Ellwood asked the court to remand the case to Commerce for reconsideration (Ellwood City Forge Co. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00191).

Commerce initiated its administrative review and selected Lucchini Mame Forge as the sole mandatory respondent in March 2022. Lucchini partially responded, failing to provide key items requested by Commerce. Ellwood said it submitted "several rounds of comments" to Commerce pointing out deficiencies in Lucchini’s response and Commerce issued supplemental questionnaires to Lucchini to fill those gaps.

Lucchini’s response indicated it lacked home market or third country sales of the foreign-like product during the period of review, forcing Commerce to calculate its AD based upon a comparison of U.S. price to constructed normal value.

Commerce requested that the parties submit potential sources of constructed value profit and selling expense data. Ellwood submitted data from Officina Meccanica Roselli (OMR), Metalcam and Cogne Acciai Speciali but asked Commerce to use only the OMR data. Lucchini submitted data for four other companies, saying each had “operations, products and customer base” similar to Lucchini's. Ellwood said Lucchini failed to provide supporting documentation.

In its final results, Commerce tossed three of Lucchini's submitted sources, but averaged the fourth with all three of Ellwood's provided data sources, resulting in a 2.97% dumping margin for Lucchini. Ellwood argued that if Commerce had adjusted its calculations for the data preferred by Ellwood, Commerce would have calculated a higher constructed normal value and had a resulting higher dumping margin.

Lucchini also reported that the ingots used to produce the blocks were produced by an affiliated party, Lucchini Industries (LIND). Ellwood said Lucchini failed to provide information concerning LIND’s sales of ingots to unaffiliated parties on a grade-specific basis in its questionnaire response despite a specific request by Commerce. The department gave Lucchini several more attempts to submit the required information, with Lucchini finally saying that it was unable to provide a market price for the ingots and that they were sold publicly.

Despite the imperfect record and additional evidence supplied by Ellwood, Commerce made no adjustment for the affiliated ingot purchases and accepted an untimely submission from Lucchini containing "unsolicited data" about Lucchini’s sales of ingots to affiliates and nonaffiliates.

Ellwood argued that the final results failed to address Ellwood's repeated requests to reject Lucchini’s untimely disclosures but that Commerce instead unlawfully credited Lucchini’s "untested" claims. The department then "devised an entirely new adjustment" to Lucchini’s affiliate’s ingot sales to unaffiliated parties that "drastically distorted" the department's analysis, the complaint said.