The Mazzetta Company, a Highland Park, Illinois-based importer of seafood, sued the U.S. Department of Commerce on 9 October, challenging its antidumping duty administrative review on Vietnamese warmwater shrimp, covering the period between 1 February, 2016, and 31 January, 2017.
The suit was filed in the United States Court of International Trade and complains that the Commerce Department used black tiger shrimp from Bangladesh as a comparable market to vannamei shrimp from Vietnam; Mazzetta believes that the Indonesian vannamei market would be a better surrogate.
The Commerce Department uses surrogate markets to attempt to establish antidumping rates for markets it rules are not “fair-market” economies, such as Vietnam.
For the administrative review in question, the Commerce Department set its preliminary rate at 25.39 percent, a rate the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) called a “mistake.”
However, the Commerce Department set its final rate even higher, at 25.76 percent, in September 2018.
In its suit, Mazzetta is asking that the court declare the U.S. Commerce Department’s rate to be unsubstantiated by evidence and not in accordance with law, and as a result, that the department recalculate the rate and provide compensation to Mazzetta for the losses it has suffered as a result of the high rate.
A Mazzetta spokesperson declined comment to SeafoodSource, saying it would be inappropriate to comment on ongoing legal matters.
The U.S. Court of International Trade in June 2018 previously ruled in favor of an appeal filed by the Soc Trang Seafood Joint Stock Company (Stapimex) and the Mazzetta Company, requiring the Commerce Department to reconsider its conclusions from its 10th administrative review of U.S. shrimp imports from Vietnam between 1 February, 2014, and 31 January, 2015.
