A Florida husband and wife were each sentenced to 57 months in prison on Feb. 14 for illegally avoiding customs duties and violating the Lacey Act on between $25 million and $65 million worth of plywood products, DOJ announced. Noel and Kelsy Hernandez Quintana also were ordered to pay, "jointly and severally, $42,417,318.50 in forfeitures, as well as $1,630,324.46 in storage costs incurred by the government" after the couple "declined to abandon" the plywood seized by the government, DOJ said.
CBP has detained thousands of Porsche, Bentley and Audi cars in U.S. ports after a supplier to parent company Volkswagen found a "Chinese subcomponent" in the vehicles that violated the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the Financial Times reported on Feb. 14. The delivery will be delayed until as late as the end of March, the paper said.
The Commerce Department said in a new scope ruling Feb. 9 that some of exporter Asia Wheel’s 22.5 to 24.5 inch diameter steel wheels -- those with rims and discs made in Thailand or a third country out of inputs from China -- are not covered by AD/CVD orders on steel wheels from China.
CBP released a new guidance document Feb. 12 on how the agency sets bond amounts, replacing the bond directive it issued in 1991 with a new "Guide for the Public" that the agency has said will accompany a revised internal directive on bonds (see 2309150061).
The Commerce Department has released a correction to the final results of the antidumping duty administrative review on finished carbon steel flanges from India (A-533-871) covering exports of subject merchandise during the period of review Aug. 1, 2021, through July 31, 2022. Commerce said the appendix in the original final results notice, listing companies that were not individually examined, contained the names of five companies that actually were individually reviewed: Bansidhar Chiranjilal; Norma (India) Limited; R. N. Gupta & Company Limited; Uma Shanker Khandelwal & Co.; and USK Exports Private Limited. With the notice, Commerce removed those names from the appendix list.
CBP found substantial evidence that Exquis, Lollicup USA and Sanster evaded antidumping and countervailing duty orders covering thermal paper, the agency said. It found that all three importers evaded the orders on thermal paper from China and found that Exquis also evaded the AD order on thermal paper from South Korea, CBP said.
CBP is extending its Global Business Identifier pilot through Feb. 23, 2027, the agency said in a notice released Feb. 9. CBP is also removing commodity and country of origin limitations on the entries eligible for the test, it said, opening the test up to more participants across a wider range of industries.
Starting March 1, non-industrial diamonds of 1 carat or greater, mined in Russia but with another country of origin cannot be entered into the U.S., whether by import or into a foreign-trade zone, unless the Office of Foreign Assets Control licensed that import.
Trade groups representing importers of motor vehicles are asking the Interagency Autos Committee to advocate for allowing used cars made during the NAFTA years to enter duty free if those vehicles qualified for NAFTA benefits, and to make it easier to prove that cars built since July 1, 2020, qualify for USMCA tariff benefits.
Automakers and their suppliers are telling the Biden administration in comments submitted ahead of an upcoming report that not having a form for certificate of origin has paradoxically made compliance more difficult. They also said that companies are having a difficult time certifying how much workers in the supply chain earn, and that the absence of final USMCA regulations are all problems for trade compliance in the more than three years since USMCA took effect.