The European Commission has announced that a World Trade Organization (WTO) panel has declared that the antidumping (AD) duties on stainless steel tubes imposed by China on EU and Japanese imports in 2012 are illegal in the light of WTO rules.
According to the EC statement, the WTO panel found that the Chinese measures did not fully respect the prescribed WTO methods for calculating dumping margins. The margins calculated for one of the EU's exporting producers were found not to be correct. China failed also to justify its finding that the tubes imported from the EU had caused injury to China's domestic industry. Finally, the panel concluded that the Chinese antidumping procedure came short of the WTO requirements in terms of due process and transparency.
As SteelOrbis previously reported, the antidumping duty was imposed in May 2012, with dumping duty rates ranging from 9.7 percent to 39.2 percent.