With less than two weeks to spare before the June 30 deadline for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to file its remand results in the Section 301 litigation, the agency needs a 60-day extension to Aug. 29 due to the volume of work involved, the agency’s limited staff resources and other projects that are compounding its workload, DOJ said June 17 at the Court of International Trade. Akin Gump lawyers for test-case plaintiffs HMTX Industries and Jasco Products oppose the motion and soon will file a response, DOJ said. Matthew Nicely, Akin Gump’s lead attorney, declined to comment June 17.

The Court of International Trade in a June 15 opinion upheld the Commerce Department's final determination in the 2019 antidumping duty investigation on wood mouldings and millwork products from Brazil. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves ruled that Commerce properly combined the three mandatory respondents -- Araupel, Braslumber Industria de Molduras and BrasPine Madeiras -- into a single entity and correctly didn't apply the major input rule to certain log purchases. Commerce was also right to revise Araupel's general and administrative expenses to account for fair value adjustments associated with the annual revaluation of standing trees in the company's unharvested forests, the court said. The result is a zero percent dumping margin for the collapsed entity.

CBP properly denied payouts of interest assessed after liquidation, known as delinquency interest, on collected antidumping and countervailing duties under the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000, the Court of International Trade said in a series of five nearly identical opinions. Judge Timothy Stanceu ruled that it must rely on CBP's interpretation of how to administer the CDSOA and define how interest is earned on AD/CV duties given ambiguities in the statute pertaining to delinquency interest. The court also held that given that the interest is put into a single sum after liquidation, it loses its "individual character" and is no longer interest earned on the duties.

CBP no longer believes importers Global Aluminum Distributor and Hialeah Aluminum Supply evaded the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China by transshipping them through Dominican manufacturer Kingtom Aluminio. Filing its remand results at the Court of International Trade in a case related to the Enforce and Protect Act investigation, CBP said that after taking another look at the record, it cannot conclude that evasion took place (Global Aluminum Distributor v. United States, CIT #21-00198).

The Commerce Department properly found that Shelter Forest International Acquisition's hardwood plywood exports didn't circumvent the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on hardwood plywood from China, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a June 15 opinion. Affirming the Court of International Trade's opinion, the Federal Circuit said that the merchandise was commercially available before Dec. 8, 2016, and was thus not later-developed merchandise that circumvented the AD/CVD orders.

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Plaintiffs in an antidumping case failed to exhaust their administrative remedies when challenging the Commerce Department's decision to issue a questionnaire in lieu of on-site verification due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, the Court of International Trade ruled in a June 14 opinion. Judge Stephen Vaden said that the AD petitioner, Ellwood City Forge Co., had "multiple opportunities" to counter the verification methodology, but failed to do so administratively.

The Commerce Department properly found that electricity was not provided below cost in South Korea in a countervailing duty investigation, the Court of International Trade said in a June 13 opinion. Following a remand from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves said that both of the remanded issues -- Commerce's reliance on the preferential-rate standard and its failure to address the Korean Power Exchange's (KPX's) impact on the South Korean electricity market as rendering cost-recovery analysis -- now comply with the appellate court's ruling.

President Donald Trump's move to expand the Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs onto "derivative" products was part of the president's original "plan of action," thus making the expansion legal, the U.S. argued in a June 10 reply brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Centering the reply on a key Federal Circuit opinion, Transpacific Steel v. U.S., which said the president can carry out certain Section 232 tariff action beyond procedural deadlines, DOJ told the appellate court that the derivatives expansion sought to carry out the president's original goal of reaching an 80% domestic capacity utilization rate for steel and aluminum.

Importer Royal Brush Manufacturing failed to show that the Court of International Trade wrongly held that CBP did not violate the company's due process rights in an Enforce and Protect Act investigation, the U.S. argued in a June 9 reply brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In its opening brief, Royal Brush failed to cite "any legal authority" to back its theory that the trade court erred in shielding the business confidential information (BCI) from disclosure, DOJ said (Royal Brush Manufacturing Inc. v. United States, Fed. Cir. #22-1226).