No Evidence to Show US Double-Counted Industry Support, Government Says in OCTG Case

The U.S. didn’t double-count domestic producers when conducting an industry support survey for an investigation of oil country tubular goods products, the government said Aug. 26. An importer claiming otherwise keeps making arguments it hadn’t raised earlier, it said (Tenaris Bay City v. U.S., CIT # 22-00343).

The Court of International Trade remanded the survey ordering the Commerce Department “to address record evidence indicating that certain domestic companies both produce and finish OCTG,” in particular the companies Borusan Mannesmann Pipe U.S. and PTC Liberty Tubulars, the U.S. said. The department did so in its remand redetermination, it said.

Borusan Mannesmann does process OCTG, but it only uses imported inputs, not inputs purchased from another U.S. producer, it said. And PTC Liberty is a producer of OCTG -- the fact that it can also process doesn’t mean that it does so, as most OCTG producers have that capability, it said.

The government disagreed with plaintiffs led by Tenaris Bay City that the department hadn’t “resolve[d] the distortive effect identified by the Court.”

“At no point in the Court’s opinion did it hold that there was a distortive effect due to alleged ‘double counting,’” it said. “Rather, the Court stated that Commerce did not address certain record evidence, leading to an inference that there ‘may have’ been ‘doubling count[ing].’”

It also argued that Tenaris hadn’t exhausted its administrative remedies for a number of arguments raised during the remand proceeding. For example, it said, the importer only pushed back against the source of the industry support calculations post-remand.

Tenaris has tried to “obfuscate” the fact that its arguments keep changing, but it only cared about the inclusion of “mere finishing operations” in the industry support calculation, a matter that has been resolved, the government said.

“Even now, Tenaris has been unable to figure out the exact problem with the industry support calculation,” it said.

Defendant-intervenors led by Borusan Mannesmann Pipe U.S. agreed with the government in their own set of comments. They said that the petitioners took “a very conservative approach” to calculating industry support.

In, fact, they argued, including U.S. processors “results in a larger denominator, which yields a more conservative calculation of industry support.”