Latest Case: Diamond Sawblades Manufacturers' Commission v. United States (International Trade)

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Diamond Sawblades Manufacturers' Commission v. United States

Docket: 20-1478

Opinion Date: January 27, 2021

Judge: Richard Gary Taranto

Areas of Law: International Trade

Importation of diamond sawblades from China is governed by an antidumping duty order, 19 U.S.C. 1673. In an administrative review of duties owed on subject merchandise sold to unaffiliated U.S. purchasers in 2014-2015, the Department of Commerce investigated the dumping margin of Bosun, which sends its imports to one of its two U.S. importer-affiliates for sale to unaffiliated U.S. purchasers. The other importer-affiliate imports diamond sawblades from a Bosun entity in Thailand. The importer-affiliates trade between themselves. Bosun’s affiliates did not record the country of origin on each sale. Bosun supplied country-of-origin information from three sources: the country-specific product code for some products; the unit price (which allowed origin identification for some products); and, for the remainder, an inference based on the first-in, first-out, (FIFO) premise. Commerce found the information sufficiently verified. On remand from the Trade Court, Commerce used “facts otherwise available” under 19 U.S.C. 1677e(a), and drew adverse inferences as to the totality of Bosun-sawblade sales. The Federal Circuit remanded. Commerce may have applied section 1677e(a) too broadly by disregarding all of Bosun’s country-of-origin information. The errors Commerce identified in Bosun’s information are apparently limited in their reliability-undermining effect to a defined subset of sawblades, whose origin Bosun identified only through the FIFO-inference. If the unreliable information is confined to some or all sawblades within that defined subset, there is no substantial evidence to support Commerce’s determination that all of the Bosun-supplied origin information was unreliable.