Two importers each will pay seven-figure sums to settle False Claims Act lawsuits related to the undervaluation of their customs entries and underpayment of duties, DOJ said Aug. 11. Apparel importer Luchiano Visconti and its manager, Sasha Hourizadeh, will together pay $3.64 million to settle allegations they sent fraudulent invoices to their customs broker that understated the actual price paid. In a separate settlement, Eos Energy Storage will pay $1.02 million to resolve allegations that it failed to declare assists and other additions to transaction value.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.’s annual report to Congress (see 2208020043) shows CFIUS is reviewing record numbers of investments and sheds light on how the Biden administration is approaching screening efforts, especially surrounding Chinese companies, law firms said. The report also indicates that companies should expect even more government scrutiny of foreign direct investments in coming years, firms said, including for non-notified transactions.
Contrary to Google assertions in a complaint Monday against Sonos in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that it “rarely sues” other companies for patent infringement (see 2208090010), Google previously sued Sonos “all over the world and Sonos has prevailed in every decided case,” said Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus in a statement Tuesday. “By contrast, the courts have repeatedly validated Sonos’ claims that Google is infringing its core patented smart speaker technology,” said Lazarus. Google’s new litigation is “an intimidation tactic designed to retaliate against Sonos for speaking out against Google’s monopolistic practices,” he said. Google has avoided paying Sonos “a fair royalty for the roughly 200 patents it is currently infringing,” and keeps attempting to “grind down a smaller competitor whose innovations it has misappropriated,” he said. “It will not succeed." Google followed through with threats to bring Sonos before the International Trade Commission, filing two complaints Tuesday (in dockets 337-3634 and 337-3635) alleging infringement of a total of seven patents. The complaints seek separate Tariff Act Section 337 investigations into the allegations. They ask for cease and desist and limited exclusion orders on Sonos audio players with Sonos Voice Control, plus those that support wired or wireless charging or the “commissioning of devices into a system via short-range transmissions.”
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
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Remand redeterminations recently submitted by the Commerce Department in two related cases are not final agency decisions that can be sustained by the Court of International Trade, and doing so would circumvent the trade court’s judicial review process, CIT said in a pair of Aug. 10 decisions rejecting the remand results in a case involving a scope ruling on door thresholds. Filed in response to the second CIT remands in cases involving two respective scope rulings that found the door thresholds from Columbia and Worldwide Door subject to antidumping and countervailing duties on aluminum extrusions from China, the remand redeterminations, filed under protest, only promise a future “revised scope ruling” if the trade court sustains. “Because it is not the actual scope ruling or determination Commerce plans to issue, it would not be self-effectuating should the court sustain it, and the agency decision that would follow if it were sustained would escape direct judicial review,” CIT said in the two nearly identical opinions.
Plaintiffs in three similar cases challenging CBP’s denial of delinquency interest on collected antidumping and countervailing duties under the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act will appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, according to three notices of appeal filed Aug. 5. The Court of International Trade ruled in June that CBP properly denied the payments, relying on CBP’s interpretation of how to administer CDSOA and define how interest is earned on AD/CVD given ambiguities in the statute pertaining to delinquency interest (see 2206160074). Among the appellants are Monterey Mushrooms, Hilex Poly and American Drew.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Aug. 1-7:
The Court of International Trade will close out a controversial case involving allegations of antidumping and countervailing duty evasion by a Dominican exporter in that Dominican exporter’s favor, granting on Aug. 8 a motion to enter judgment sustaining CBP’s reversal of an evasion finding for Kingtom Aluminio in an Enforce and Protect Act investigation. Kingtom, several importers and the U.S. government had filed a joint motion requesting CBP’s remand results be sustained (see 2206230037).
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative heard from business groups, businesses that offer traceability solutions and civil society groups, 45 in all, on how to shape a forced labor strategy -- but their views diverged strongly on what the approach should be.