US Opposes Flange Exporter's Reconsideration Bid at CIT on AFA Rate

The U.S. on March 4 opposed exporter Chandan Steel Limited's motion for reconsideration of the Court of International Trade's order sustaining the company's adverse facts available rate in the 2018-19 antidumping duty review on stainless steel flanges from India. The government argued that the court properly found it didn't need to resolve certain issues pertaining to Chandan's allocation method for reporting its costs of production and that Chandan failed to show any "manifest error" in the court's decision to sustain the use of AFA based on the exporter's inadequate reporting of comparison market window period sales (Kisaan Die Tech Private, Ltd. v. United States, CIT # 21-00512).

In December, the court sustained the 146.25% AFA rate on Chandan after finding that the exporter repeatedly misreported its foreign sales information and costs of production for those foreign sales (see 2312110043). Chandan asked the court to reconsider its decision, urging reconsideration of the materiality of the company's errors in reporting window period sales, the company's misreporting of production costs, and misreporting of prices and duty refunds.

The trade court said it didn't need to resolve any disagreements pertaining to the allocation method for the reporting of the COP and from reporting of "gross unit price, quantity discounts, other discounts, and duty refunds," the U.S. noted. "That was so because, in the Court’s view, even if Chandan were correct on these two issues, the repeated misreporting of its comparison market database precluded Chandan from prevailing on the merits with respect to Commerce’s resort to facts available with an adverse inference."

Even if the reporting errors Commerce cited were "nonexistent, minor, or inconsequential," the court wasn't able to find that the omission of small-size flange sales occurring in the periods outside the review period "could be so described." As a result, there's no basis for reconsideration, the government argued.

That leaves the "only potential issue for reconsideration" to be the court's holding that Commerce didn't err by using AFA based only on the inadequate reporting of comparison market window period sales. The U.S. said no "manifest error" has been demonstrated by Chandan on this holding.

In the review, Commerce lacked "reporting of sales of Chandan's smaller-sized flanges that occurred outside the POR, which sales were unavailable for comparison with U.S. sales." The court rejected the exporter's "implied premise" that the agency needed to examine additional information Chandan later submitted and use it to find a dumping margin. Commerce was within its discretion in rejecting these untimely submissions, and without this information, "there is no support in the record for Chandan’s claim that the missing window period sales were not applicable to 99.6 percent of U.S. sales," the brief said.

This information also wouldn't have clearly helped Chandan since the exporter "made this argument" by "combining two flawed versions of its comparison market sales database, with no reason to believe that the combination would yield reliable results."