The Commerce Department illegally relied on unverified data from respondent Saffron Living Co. in an antidumping duty investigation on mattresses from Thailand, the Court of International Trade ruled in a July 20 opinion. While the government claimed that because Commerce was unable to verify Saffron's information, it could use the exporter's information as facts otherwise available, Judge M. Miller Baker said this reading would "eviscerate the separate requirement" that Commerce verify all information relied on in making a final determination.

The Court of International Trade in a July 19 opinion upheld the Commerce Department's decision to raise the dumping margins in the 2018-19 administrative review of the antidumping duties on heavy-walled rectangular welded carbon steel pipes and tubes from Mexico for mandatory respondents Maquilacero and Prolamsa. The margins were raised from 0% to 3.48% for Maquilacero. and from 0% to 2.11%. for Prolamsa.

The Court of International Trade in a July 20 opinion refused to invalidate its past order instructing CBP to reliquidate Target Corp.'s metal-top ironing tables, saying that doing so would "turn the clock back over 40 years" prior to the Customs Courts Act's passage and "again call into question whether a party before the Court could obtain full and complete relief." Reversing the order as Target requests would "elevate the principle of finality" of liquidation "over the inherent power" of the trade court under Article III of the Constitution, Judge Leo Gordon said.

The Commerce Department has "muddled together irrelevant and tangential statistical concepts in a future effort to obscure" that the agency "is not really using" the Cohen's d test to root out "masked" dumping, the Canadian government and a group of Canadian companies argued in a proposed amicus brief. Filing the brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a suit over the antidumping duty investigation on utility scale wind towers from Canada, the Canadian government said Commerce "plugs numbers into the Cohen's d formula," but the inputs do not match the criteria under which the formula provides "meaningful information" (Marmen Inc. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-1877).

The Commerce Department is set to increase the antidumping duty rate it assigned to Best Mattresses and Rose Lion in an AD investigation on mattresses from Cambodia, it said in a remand redetermination dated July 17. Commerce reopened the record and issued a supplemental questionnaire to the petitioners, asking for further explanation of the process by which they retrieved Emirates Sleep’s financial statements and how the statements constituted publicly available information (Best Mattresses International v. U.S., CIT # 21-00281).

Proposed changes by the Commerce Department to its antidumping and countervailing duty regulations were met with a diverse array of responses from governments, producers, importers, lawyers and others, with particular focus on the agency's proposal to consider intellectual property, human rights and environmental protections in AD/CVD proceedings and proposed changes that would allow particular market situation adjustments to the sales-below-cost test.

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The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative exceeded its authority in imposing the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs on China, covering a total of $320 billion worth of Chinese imports, plaintiff-appellants in the massive case against the duties, led by HTMX Industries and Jasco Products Co., argued in their opening brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Appealing the Court of International Trade's decision upholding the tariffs (see 2204010061), the companies said USTR did not have the authority to set the duties since the authority was not directly delegated by Congress, in violation of the "major questions doctrine" (HMTX Industries v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1891).

The Commerce Department reversed its imposition of total adverse facts available on antidumping duty respondent Oman Fasteners in its July 17 remand results, resulting in a complete removal of a 154.33% AD rate for the company, Oman Fasteners, Commerce had ruled had failed to cooperate to the best of its ability because it did not submit all of its responses to a supplemental questionnaire by the deadline. The single late submission missed Commerce's cut-off time by 16 minutes and Court of International Trade Judge M. Miller Baker said that the ensuing suit was "not a close case" when he remanded the results in a February opinion (see 2302280040) (Oman Fasteners v. U.S., CIT # 22-00348)..

The Commerce Department "misapplied the statutory standard" for picking surrogate countries in the 2018-19 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on frozen fish fillets from Vietnam by excluding candidate countries that have a comparable level of economic development, the Court of International Trade ruled in a July 7 opinion made public July 17.