Non-market-economy ruling has steel fired up

Dec 22, 2011 | 06:29 PM | Catherine Ngai

Tags  Commerce Department, appeals court, countervailing duties, anti-dumping duties, Roger Schagrin, Tom Gibson, Leo Gerard, OCTG steel

NEW YORK — Domestic steel interests are blasting an appeals court ruling this week affirming that the Commerce Department can’t apply countervailing duties in a trade case involving non-market economies.

"It was a bad decision, bad justice and pathetic policy. This is horrible for American workers and for the millions of jobs lost to China," Roger Schagrin, a trade attorney at Washington-based Schagrin Associates, told AMM.

"This ruling gives Chinese producers and exporters a license to unfairly attack the U.S. market with the full resources of the Chinese government," American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) president and chief executive officer Thomas J. Gibson said in a statement.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit earlier this week upheld an earlier order by the Court of International Trade (CIT) stating that Commerce couldn’t impose countervailing duties on non-market economies in the 2008 case pitting GPX International Tire Corp. against the United States (AMM, Sept. 29, 2009). The CIT deemed that goods from China—classified as a non-market economy—couldn’t have both anti-dumping and countervailing duties due to the possibility of "double counting."....