AD Petitioner Contests AD Investigations on Shopping Bags From Colombia, Portugal

Antidumping petitioner Coalition for Fair Trade in Shopping Bags filed a pair of complaints at the Court of International Trade on Sept. 12 challenging the Commerce Department's antidumping duty investigations on paper shopping bags from Colombia and Portugal (Coalition for Fair Trade in Shopping Bags v. United States, CIT #'s 24-00157, -00158).

Regarding the investigation on Colombia, the coalition argued that Commerce failed to apply adverse facts available against respondent Ditar. The exporter's submissions to the agency contained "numerous discrepancies" with its normal books and records, including "errors in reported product characteristics, sales quantities, sales prices and price adjustments, product descriptions, shipment dates, and destinations," the complaint said.

The petitioner argued that Ditar also reported certain sales as home market sales despite the fact that they were ultimately "destined for export to the United States." As a result, information that Commerce needed wasn't on the record, "because Ditar's sales responses were so replete with errors as to be unusable." The discrepancies reveal that "Ditar failed to put sufficient effort into confirming that the data reported for antidumping purposes matched its business records," the complaint said.

Commerce decided not to use AFA since the errors weren't "sufficiently pervasive or material to render the entire response unusable" and that the errors on the sales for export were excusable because Ditar "was unaware of the destination at the time of sale." The petitioner said these findings aren't backed by substantial evidence and weren't made under the appropriate standard.

The coalition argued that in the AD investigation on shopping bags from Portugal, Commerce failed to treat respondent Finieco Industria e Comercio de Embalagens's fixed payments to sales employees as indirect selling expenses.

The petitioner said Finieco paid its Portugal staff in part by making certain fixed payments that weren't directly tied to the value of each employee's home market sales. Nevertheless, the respondent reported the expenses as "fixed commissions." Since the payments weren't directly tied to individual sales, "they should not have been treated as commissions or any type of direct selling expense," the complaint said.

The expenses instead should have been classified as indirect selling expenses.

Commerce treated the expenses as direct selling expenses since it found the payments to be dependent on personnel making sales and could be linked to individual sales. These findings "are based on a misunderstanding of the factual record, and they are unsupported by substantial evidence," the petitioner said.