Domestic Producers Again Say Steel Pipe Exporter Misunderstanding Circumvention Inquiries

Defendant-intervenors opposed Oct. 15 an exporter’s motion for judgment, supporting an affirmative Commerce Department circumvention determination regarding circular welded steel pipe imports from Vietnam. The department claimed the pipe actually originated from South Korea, India and China (SeAH Steel Vina Corp. v. United States, CIT Consol. #s 23-00256, -00257, -00258).

As the U.S. argued in its Sept. 24 brief (see 2409230051), defendant-intervenor domestic producers led by Bull Moose Tube Company argued that exporter SeAH Steel Vina Corp. was confusing antidumping and countervailing duty reviews with circumvention inquiries. SeAH argued that older AD/CVD reviews on its goods supported a negative finding, but these didn’t date to the period of inquiry, had different records and were irrelevant, Bull Moose said -- it didn’t matter whether or not SeAH’s pipe had been dumped or subsidized.

“[SeAH]’s argument is, at base, a complaint that Commerce ruled on the basis of the anticircumvention statute as it is, not the statute that SSV attempts to invent in its brief,” it said. “To derive its preferred meaning, [SeAH] employs a Rube Goldberg-like interpretive process based on strained inferences from legislative history, dictionary definitions, and entirely different statutes, while almost completely failing to cite to any relevant case law.”

The domestic producer also argued that Commerce was right to find that SeAH’s Vietnamese processing was a “process of assembly or completion” under the statute governing circumvention inquiries. It said the exporter, relying on the dictionary, congressional committee reports and the Harmonized Tariff Schedule’s General Rules of Interpretation, was creating a new meaning for the word “completion,” imagining it to be a term of art.

SeAH argued that the term “completion” only refers to situations in which a input, such as steel coil, already has the essential character of the final product, such as steel pipe. But this would make circumvention much too easy, defeating the purpose of investigations, the producer said.

And SeAH claimed that the three factors under 19 U.S.C. 1677j(b)(3) were “necessary preconditions” to a finding of circumvention, but the statute itself makes clear Commerce is only required to take them into account, Bull Moose said.