AD Petitioner Says Commerce Failed to Ask Follow-Up Questions in AD Review on Chromate

Antidumping petitioner Lumimove, doing business as WPC Technologies, challenged four elements of the Commerce Department's review of the AD order on strontium chromate from Austria covering entries in 2021-22, in a July 11 complaint at the Court of International Trade (Lumimove v. U.S., CIT # 24-00105).

The first was on Commerce's alleged "failure to investigate and discern the level of affiliation or close supplier relationship" between exporter Habich and its U.S. buyers. The petitioner said Commerce failed to "conduct a fulsome examination into whether" Habich can exert control over its U.S. customers, or vice versa, by "refusing to solicit the necessary information."

During the review, Habich admitted to having a "close relationship with its U.S. customers," though the agency looked into only the "companies' legal relationship," the petitioner said.

The second item was on whether Mexico is a "true comparison market" for purposes of calculating normal value in the review. WPC Technologies alleged that Commerce failed to carry out the review in a way that accurately finds if "Habich’s use of Mexico as a comparison market ensured that the sales were in the ordinary course of trade."

The agency failed to collect information needed to find whether Mexico is a "valid comparison market," because the record shows that Mexico is "a part of the U.S. market" and not an independent market, the brief alleged.

The third element concerned Habich's alleged "failure to report accurate costs of production" and the agency's "failure to verify the reported costs." During the review, WPC Technologies said certain of Habich's quarterly costs were "aberrational," and asked Commerce to "revise its cost-test by utilizing a simple average of the reported costs for the quarters without discrepancies as representative of the costs for the quarter containing discrepancies."

Fourth, the petitioner said these three errors amounted to a failure to "issue follow-up questions to Habich related to critical aspects of its dumping analysis." The agency didn't conduct the review "in accordance with its statutory authority."