The Commerce Department abused its discretion by rejecting filings in antidumping duty and countervailing duty investigations that were submitted 21 and 87 minutes late, respectively, the Court of International Trade said in a pair of Feb. 15 decisions. Commerce's denials of the questionnaire responses from a Turkish exporter amounted to a "draconian penalty" on the AD/CVD respondent for an "inadvertent technical error by its counsel that had no appreciable effect" on the investigations, the court said. The result was a 53.65% dumping rate and 158.44% countervailing duty rate for the exporter.

Both CBP's Trade Remedy Law Enforcement Directorate and its Office of Regulation and Rulings failed to make a factual finding when it said that importers Global Aluminum Distributor and Hialeah Aluminum Supply evaded the antidumping duty and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China, the importers and Dominican producer Kingtom Aluminio said. In two motions for judgment at the Court of International Trade, the plaintiffs and Kingtom both argued that CBP skirted the evidentiary standard, instead basing its conclusion on a vague reference to Kingtom's ties to China and discrepancies between the importers' and Kingtom's records (Global Aluminum Distributor v. United States, CIT Consol. #21-00198).

The Department of Justice wants the U.S. Court of International Trade to include two documents that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative “realized” were missing from the administrative record filed April 30 by the government in the Section 301 litigation, it said in a Feb. 15 motion to correct the record. USTR Assistant General Counsel Megan Grimball said in a declaration that the documents were “inadvertently omitted.” DOJ said USTR discovered the omissions in the two weeks since the Feb. 1 oral argument.

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The Commerce Department reversed its decision to collapse two mandatory respondents and one of their affiliates in an antidumping duty investigation. In a bid to bring its stance in line with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Commerce said in Feb. 14 remand results submitted to the Court of International Trade that evidence to collapse all three entities was insufficient, particularly because evidence from the two mandatory respondents didn't show any common ownership. The agency also reinstated its use of adverse facts available over one of the respondents' reporting of its products' yield strength (Prosperity Tieh Enterprise Co., Ltd. v. United States, CIT #16-00138).

The Commerce Department erred when it found that Al Ghurair Iron & Steel LLC circumvented the antidumping duty and countervailing duty orders on corrosion-resistant steel products (CORE) from China via the United Arab Emirates, AGIS said in its Feb. 14 opening brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Al Ghurair Iron & Steel v. United States, Fed. Cir. #22-1199).

The Court of International Trade in a Feb. 14 order granted an injunction until the conclusion of litigation against the liquidation of two plaintiffs' mattress imports. The Department of Justice pushed back against that timeline. It urged an end date of April 30, the same end date as the first administrative review period of the antidumping duty order the plaintiffs are contesting. Judge Gary Katzmann said that the plaintiffs, Best Mattresses International and Rose Lion Furniture International, sufficiently showed a likelihood to succeed on the merits of the case and that they would be irreparably harmed without the indefinite injunction.

The effective dates of the Commerce Department's partial revocation of the antidumping and countervailing duties on solar cells from China ran contrary to the agency's stated practice, because they excluded unliquidated entries that weren't subject to the final results of an administrative review or automatic liquidation at the time, importer Source Global said in a Feb. 11 complaint at the Court of International Trade (Source Global, PBC v. United States, CIT #22-00009).

Dominican aluminum extrusion manufacturer Kingtom Aluminio is guilty of evading the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China, CBP said in a Feb. 4 evasion determination. Already party to two Enforce and Protect Act evasion inquiries as a producer, Kingtom was found guilty of evasion in a separate case where it acted as the importer of record. In fact, CBP used the fact that Kingtom began importing aluminum extrusions into the U.S. itself following the other two EAPA cases as evidence of Kingtom's alleged evasion.

A CBP protest was not needed to establish jurisdiction in two companies' challenge to CBP's assessment of Section 301 tariffs on goods subsequently granted a tariff exclusion since the challenge is not an entry-specific matter, the companies, ARP Materials and Harrison Steel, said in a Feb. 7 brief. Replying to the U.S.'s arguments at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the plaintiff-appellants said that their challenge has jurisdiction under Section 1581(i), the trade court's "residual" jurisdiction provision, since the action relates to CBP's imposition of the requirements of an "inapt statute" to all the entries excluded from tariff lists 2 and 3 (ARP Materials Inc. v. United States, Fed. Cir. #21-2176).