Trade Cases

Domestic Steel Mills File Extension Request in Countervailing Duty Case on Coated Steels

August 4, 2015

On June 3rd Nucor, US Steel, ArcelorMittal USA, AK Steel, Steel Dynamics and California Steel filed antidumping and countervailing duty petition against China, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Italy on corrosion-resistant steels. To put this into layman’s terms the domestic mills filed a dumping (AD) and CVD suit on producers of galvanized and Galvalume (zinc-aluminum) products.

There are provisions in the law that allow for the petitioners to request an extension of the preliminary determination findings which are currently scheduled for August 27th. Submissions have to be made 25 days prior to the August 27th deadline.

The steel mills have filed for an extension on the preliminary determination of the countervailing duty portion of the coated steels trade case. They have not (yet) filed for an extension on the antidumping portion of the case. The AD preliminary determination date is currently October 16th although our legal sources are advising that it too could be extended when the time comes (mid-September).

To grant an extension the Department of Commerce must find that:

1) The case is extraordinarily complicated.
2) The respondents appear to be cooperating with the investigation.

The mills provided the following reasoning for their request, “The extensions are needed because respondents have not yet been selected in some investigations, and in each investigation the number of subsidy allegations is substantial. Additionally, it would be desirable to have all the preliminary determinations fall on the same day, to facilitate investigation by the International Trade Commission.”

The mills have asked for the maximum amount of time to be extended which would move the preliminary determination on the CVD suit from August 27th to November 2nd.

The mills have asked for a ruling of Critical Circumstances which, if found, would mean that duties would be collected on material arriving into the U.S.A. 90 days prior to the publication of the preliminary determination.

We spoke with a trade attorney on the subject who told us that these filings are normal in trade cases as they are extremely complicated due to the number of products, countries and who should be selected to respond to the petition.

We will continue to follow all of the flat rolled steel trade cases closely and we encourage those who are interested to attend our Steel Summit Conference where you will get to see a very strong panel on the subject with Kevin Dempsey of the AISI, Richard Chriss of the AIIS and Lewis Leibowitz who is a trade attorney with The Law Office of Lewis E Leibowitz.

Many of our speakers have committed to staying at the conference for an extended period of time so that our attendees can interact with them on a one-on-one basis.