More than 190 solar companies sent a letter Sept. 22 to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo urging the rejection of requests to begin anti-circumvention inquiries on solar cells and panels from Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. “Steep duties proposed by an anonymous group of petitioners would devastate thousands of U.S. solar companies and cause the industry to miss out on 18 gigawatts (GW) of solar deployment by 2023,” the Solar Energy Industries Association said in a press release.
LG Electronics, and its U.S. affiliate, launched a case at the Court of International Trade against the International Trade Commission for freezing out certain members of its counsel from a safeguard extension proceeding on solar panels, in a Sept. 16 complaint. The ITC did not grant full access to proprietary information for all of LGE's legal team, from the firm Curtis Mallet-Prevost, due to the lawyers' roles in representing China in a dispute settlement case at the World Trade Organization (LG Electronics USA, Inc., et al. v. United States, CIT 21-00520).
CBP field officers were instructed to allow for foreign-trade zone storage of goods stopped under a withhold release order while an admissibility decision is made, said Jim Swanson, CBP director-cargo and conveyance security and controls, speaking at the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones virtual conference Sept. 21. He said the agency told the “field folks to allow those goods” to be put “in a foreign-trade zone under the very tight conditions that we outline.” While Swanson previously said a public guidance would come soon (see 2104290003), he said at the conference that “we're still working on getting it in writing, because there's a lot of legal stuff and there's some changes going on in the background.”
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Sept. 13-19:
The Court of International Trade rejected an importer's bid for reconsideration of its challenge of the countervailing duty rate assessed on its tire imports. The court found for the second time that the importer lacked proper jurisdiction due to an untimely filed protest of a liquidation decision. “The lesson is both clear and stark: Don’t sit on your rights,” Judge Stephen Alexander Vaden said.
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
The Court of International Trade granted the Commerce Department's motion to lift a stay and voluntarily remand an antidumping duty case to give the agency a chance to consider new information showing inaccuracies in the mandatory respondent's reported sales prices, CIT said in a Sept. 20 order. The inaccuracies are based on potential fraud and Commerce has an interest in making sure the proceedings are free of fraud, the trade court said.
The Commerce Department rightly made the switch to neutral facts available from adverse facts available in an antidumping review, following a previous Court of International Trade decision that found Commerce failed to adequately give assistance to a small, first-time respondent, CIT said in a Sept. 20 decision.
The Court of International Trade rejected an importer's bid for reconsideration of its challenge of the countervailing duty rate assessed on its tire imports. The court found for the second time that the importer lacked proper jurisdiction due to an untimely filed protest of a liquidation decision. “The lesson is both clear and stark: Don’t sit on your rights,” Judge Stephen Alexander Vaden said.
An anti-circumvention inquiry requested by a U.S. industry coalition amounts to an attempt to impose new antidumping and countervailing duties on solar cells from Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam without the strictures of real AD/CVD investigations, rather than serving as valid allegations of circumvention of Chinese solar cells duties, two U.S. importers said in a brief filed Sept. 15 asking the Commerce Department not to initiate the inquiries.