Washington—The petitioners in the trade investigation of Multilayered Wood Flooring from China, named The Coalition for American Hardwood Parity (CAHP), have requested that the U.S. Department of Commerce extend its deadline for issuing the preliminary determination in the antidumping portion of that proceeding. If the request is granted by the Commerce Department, as anticipated, the preliminary antidumping determination will be issued in mid-May.
According to Jeff Levin, counsel for the CAHP, requests for extensions of preliminary determinations by petitioning parties are considered routine and occur in the vast majority of investigations, particularly those that involve China.
The request for extension of the preliminary antidumping determination allows the Commerce Department and petitioners additional time to scrutinize and offer comment upon the questionnaire responses submitted by those Chinese manufacturers that have been chosen as mandatory respondents to the investigation.
“The Coalition is carefully reviewing the questionnaire responses presented so far by the foreign respondents, and we have already submitted over 60 pages of comments noting deficiencies and inconsistencies in these responses which require further analysis, and supplemental requests for information by the Department,” Levin said. “We are currently preparing additional rounds of deficiency comments and additional allegations regarding dumping practices by Chinese producers.”
According to Levin, without an extension, the preliminary determination would be issued simply on the basis of the information presented by the Chinese producers in their questionnaire responses, with little or no opportunity to assess and challenge that information. “There is considerable history regarding past investigations involving Chinese manufacturers, in which serious questions were raised involving the accuracy and completeness of the information reported in questionnaire responses,” said Levin. “We want to ensure that this investigation accurately captures all of the necessary key information and that the Department has ample opportunity to scrutinize the quality of the information presented.”
For more information, visit usfloorparity.org.