US Opposes Petitioner’s Motion for Judgment in Italian Forged Steel Fluid End Block Case

The U.S. on May 24 pushed back against a petitioner’s claim that the Commerce Department allowed an exporter too much leeway in the first antidumping duty review of forged steel fluid end blocks from Italy (Ellwood City Forge Co. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00191).

Commerce had to construct a value for exporter Lucchini Mame Forge, the review’s sole respondent, because it had no home market sales. It did so by averaging the financial data from three companies selected by respondent Ellwood City Forge and the data of a fourth chosen by Lucchini (see 2310130061), the government said.

The department was within its rights to use the data of all four companies instead of only that of the one producer preferred by Ellwood, it said. The petitioner had argued that the information from Lucchini’s proposed company was insufficient because parts were untranslated, but those “parts” were only a single word, it said.

Commerce was also right to use Lucchini’s submission rebutting Ellwood’s own filing of data regarding a major input analysis the department conducted for the exporter, the government said. It said the relevant statute requires rejection of “untimely filed or unsolicited material,” not just “untimely new factual information.”

And it hadn’t been required to explain to Ellwood why it chose to accept Lucchini’s submission rather than consider the submission untimely, it said. It explained that the law only requires such explanation when the department does reject a filing for untimeliness.

“For example, Commerce did not need to explain its reasons for acceptance of Ellwood’s response to Commerce’s request for market price information,” it said.