Surety firm American Service Insurance Co. moved to dismiss its customs case at the Court of International Trade. American Service Insurance, serving as a surety for New Image Global, filed the case to contest how CBP weighed its tobacco products and cigar wraps classified under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 2403.91.2000, dutiable at $24.78 per pound. (American Service Insurance Co. v. United States, CIT # 16-00122).
CBP did not misapply the substantial evidence standard in finding that importers American Pacific Plywood, U.S. Global Forest and InterGlobal Forest evaded the antidumping and countervailing duties on hardwood plywood products from China, the Court of International Trade ruled in a June 22 opinion made public June 30.
Broadcasters, satellite companies and trade groups disagreed how often the FCC should reevaluate its regulatory fee structure and whether the system needs new payers, in reply comments filed by Thursday’s deadline. The agency should “continue to conduct such reviews of the work of its indirect FTEs [full-time equivalents] annually, as well as to identify additional ways that the Commission’s regulatory fee process can be made fairer and remain current,” said a joint reply from state broadcast associations in docket 23-159. “A complex accounting of indirect FTEs is not fair, administrable, or sustainable” and doing such an analysis annually would create administrative burdens and raise fairness concerns, said CTIA.
The following lawsuit was recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The Court of International Trade recently granted DOJ’s motion for more time to file its remand results in a case on CBP's Enforce and Protect Act determination that Fedmet Resources evaded the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on magnesia alumina carbon bricks from China. Fedmet opposed the motion, which sought a 60-day extension of the July 3 due date, because it would perpetuate the "continuing prejudice" suffered by the importer due to the "unjustified imposition of interim measures against Fedmet," which has effectively stopped it from importing MAC bricks since May 2020. The court granted the extension motion in a text-only order, giving the government until Sept. 1 to file the remand results. It said no further extensions would be granted unless a showing of extraordinary circumstances is made (Fedmet Resources v. U.S., CIT # 21-00248).
The Tariff Act of 1930 does not provide the exclusive means for recovering evaded antidumping duties, the Anti-Fraud Coalition said in a June 26 amicus brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The False Claims Act stands as a "complementary enforcement mechanism" used when an importer defrauds the U.S. by filing false customs forms to evade duties, the brief said. The coalition filed its brief in an FCA suit on whether Sigma Corp., along with other companies, evaded antidumping duties on welded couplets from China by submitting false customs information (Island Industries v. Sigma Corp., 9th Cir. # 22-55063).
The Commerce Department stuck by its decision to apply adverse facts available to antidumping duty respondent Meihua along with its decisions not to rescind its review of Deosen Biochemical and not to recalculate a separate rate in spite of a court order to reconsider all three, in remand results filed with the Court of International Trade on June 27 (Meihua Group International (Hong Kong) v. U.S., CIT # 22-00069).
Faegre Drinker moved its Chicago office from North Wacker Drive to 320 S. Canal St., Suite 3300. The firm filed amended notices of appearance in all of its Court of International Trade cases to note the change.
Importer Tokyo Ohka Kogyo America filed a complaint at the Court of International Trade on June 26 to contest the tariff classification of its photoresists and other chemical products for photographic uses. The suit concerns two different protests filed with CBP, one brought before the agency in 2008 and the other in 2009, though both were denied in 2017. The case on the two protests was severed in 2021 from a separate court action also brought by Tokyo Ohka Kogyo. The company is claiming that CBP improperly classified the merchandise under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 3707.90.32, dutiable at 3.2%, claiming that the goods instead should have been classified under subheading 3707.10.00, dutiable at 3% (Tokyo Ohka Kogyo America v. United States, CIT # 21-00371).
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of June 19-25: