Turkish Rebar Exporter Says US 'Misrepresenting' Its Reasoning After Oral Arguments

In a June 20 post-oral argument submission, a Turkish rebar exporter said the government is “misrepresenting" its argument by saying the exporter is claiming that any industry in Turkey can receive an industry registry certificate (Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret v. U.S., CIT #23-00131).

Holding a certificate is one of the ways a company can be exempted from Turkey’s Bank and Insurance Transactions Tax, a benefit the government is trying to find to be de jure specific to that exporter, Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi, it said. But to trade internationally, “an IR certificate must be obtained by any industrial establishment; this is mandatory,” Kaptan said. In other words, it is true that all industries are eligible to receive one, it said, but any industry that wants to engage in foreign exchange transactions must have one.

And the government also argued there is nothing on the record indicating how the Turkish government defines the term “industrial establishment,” when the industrial registration law “clearly defines the entities required to obtain a certificate,” the exporter said.

Kaptan also claimed that the Commerce Department “only cites a single reason” for finding that Kaptan’s land-lease benchmark report was unreliable. The department held that the report couldn’t be trusted because it was prepared specifically for litigation. However, “at oral argument, government counsel conceded that a report prepared for litigation is not automatically excluded, notwithstanding Commerce’s language in the ID Memo to the contrary,” it said.