Writing by Ali Quartz – One of the numerous legal challenges to quartz-surface tariffs was resolved earlier this month… As a result, the high tariffs on Chinese-made goods will remain in place.Several lawsuits, however, are still pending to challenge last year’s review of quartz tariffs on Indian surfaces.
On May 15, a group of US importers, including Arizona Tile and M S International, filed a petition with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to review the USITC’s imposition of 300%-plus tariffs in 2019.
The importers contested the USITC’s decision not to recognize US fabricators as quartz surface manufacturers. The move would have undermined Cambria Company LLC’s original unfair-trade complaint; federal law requires that more than half of U.S. producers support the complaint.
In 2021, the United States Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that the tariff action’s scope did not include fabricators. Importers filed an appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but on May 15, everyone involved in the case agreed to dismiss the complaint.
Meanwhile, legal wranglings over the review of tariffs on Indian quartz surfaces are expected to last into next year. Surprisingly, all of the parties involved in various lawsuits want the same thing, but with different outcomes.
At least four separate actions request that the CIT return the review to the US Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration (ITA). In its initial decision on the review last June, the federal agency imposed a tariff of 323.3% on products from the Antique Group, one of India’s largest exporters. As part of a procedural averaging, nearly every other Indian producer and exporter faced a 161.5% tariff.
The ITA reaffirmed the high tariff on the Antique Group earlier this year, but replaced a previous levy of 3.19% on all other India quartz surfaces except Pokarna Engineered Stone Ltd. (producers of Quantra). The ITA previously determined that the company should not be subject to the tariff because it did not meet market anti-dumping criteria.
The Antique Group is requesting that the review be returned to the ITA, claiming that the agency did not treat them fairly during the review process due to a disagreement over document-filing deadlines. Other producers and importers/exporters want the ITA to reduce tariffs even further using a standard formula for calculating overall levies. Cambria is also requesting that the entire process be returned to the ITA in order to reinstate the higher June 2022 tariffs.
The CIT will hear all of the cases concurrently, but the current docket court does not schedule oral arguments until December, pushing any decision into 2024.