The Aluminum Extruders Council (AEC) has filed a petition against China Zhongwang Holdings Ltd. alleging the company has systematically and illegally evaded duties on aluminum extrusions imported into the United States.  The alleged scheme involves hundreds of millions of pounds aluminum extrusions that are simply cut and welded into aluminum slabs.  Upon entering the U.S. these extrusions are being identified as ‘pallets’ even though the testimony the Council has gathered makes it clear the sole purpose of these extrusions is to re-melt them back into billets. “In late July, the AEC released a statement to the press calling on the United States Government, as well as others identified in the Dupre Analytics report , to investigate issues of transshipment and circumvention by Zhongwang.  We have made our case to U.S. Customs regarding the transshipment allegations, and now we are filing our circumvention case with the Department of Commerce,” said Jeff Henderson, Dir...

Our trade case continues to be extremely active, especially with the big news generated from the Dupre Analytics report.  There are several issues to report that are changing with each week. Administrative Reviews The Department of Commerce (DOC) has still not published the preliminary results from the 3rd annual administrative review. As you may recall, the rates published in June were incomplete and contained a major error.  The DOC says they will come out with those rates in October, but it is looking like they may not do that, and instead, just publish their final numbers in December. The fourth administrative review has begun.  The DOC is selecting mandatory respondents now.  They rejected our request to select ZhongWang (ZW).  Their reasoning is that ZW is not the exporter of record in the trade data, so they can’t justify selecting them.  Therefore, it is likely we will see some of the same Chinese extruders we’ve seen before. Scope Issues ...