More Solar Cell Importers, Exporters Seek to Join Case Challenging AD/CVD Duty Pause

Exporters Jinko Solar Holding Co. and Boviet Solar Technology Co., along with various of their subsidiaries and affiliated importers, moved to intervene in a case at the Court of International Trade against the Commerce Department's pause of antidumping and countervailing duties on Southeast Asian solar panels (Auxin Solar v. United States, CIT # 23-00274).

The motions follow a decision from the court last month allowing the case to proceed under Section 1581(i), the court's "residual" jurisdiction, instead of finding jurisdiction proper under Section 1581(c) as a challenge of a Commerce decision (see 2405100053).

The court's decision also allowed a group of various solar cell importers and exporters to permissibly join the case as intervenors. Judge Timothy Reif said that while the companies couldn't intervene as a matter of right, they could join the case under the court's rules for permissive intervention.

Jinko and Boviet said they should be allowed to intervene in the case since they have standing as entities that are "similarly situated with the nine" intervenors, given that they "would be adversely affected or aggrieved by an adverse ruling," they have a common question of law or fact with the U.S., and its intervention wouldn't cause undue delay or prejudice.

Jinko added that its motion to intervene is timely since intervention wasn't needed until the court's decision, which rejected the motion to dismiss the case. Jinko said before the decision "the possibility existed that the case would have been dismissed altogether such that intervention was not necessary." The motion also noted that the concurrent cases challenging Commerce's underlying anti-circumvention decisions were dismissed along with the court's decision.

The exporter said that before those developments it was "prepared to defend Commerce's negative circumvention determinations" and that it "reasonably believed that the moratorium issue would most likely be folded into the circumvention appeals," if the jurisdictional challenge won out.