the first case for argument this morning is fifteen one three four four catfish farmers of america versus united states mr mccon may please the court my name is matthew mcconaughey from the law firm of mayor brown and i'm here today on behalf of appellant of in one corporation so this is an appeal related to an anti dumping case specifically the sixth administrative review of the order against certain fish delays from vietnam a country deemed to be a non market economy by the department of commerce as such the issues that we're presenting today all relate to various surrogate values that were used to calculate dumping markets from a client the circuit like that can be considered a flaw a delicacy in certain other countries or so that the two the two values being contested today are fresh or first the fish by products which are values that are used to be dues ones normal value in the dumping with respect to the issues that are relevant to this appeal that apartment after considering the facts on the record and the arguments set for an underlying administrative case greece the pardon me to underline administrative decisions that are back here first they decided to value my clients department used import data to value my clients by products and for our surrogate financial ratios they used the financial statement of an integrated company of bangladesh the food company called fine foods and they did not in just the inventory movements when they calculated those ratios again the decision was that my client was not dumping right now so you understand in the process they were to mandatory respondents in this case an integrated company which was company the department looked at and used different financial statements for those two sets of companies they used in nine integrated financial statements two of them for this company that was not integrated and then find food which isn't a great company for m department made the right choice and in this initial in it's in an it is a reaction to a ministerial harris letter filed by petitioners in this case the department again supported its choice and said yes we're going to use fine food but no we're not going to adjust which is again what they used in the administrative process and then what they ended up reverdy jail pursuant to the c i ts litigation ok so they made certain decisions and made certain pronouncements in the administrative process that i believe they have never responded to appropriately in this at the c i tier or during the remaining process there they made the comment in the administrative process that this vital richard price quote is not contemporaneous they made the comment th that there are certain problems with the import data and i don't believe the record supports their conclusions with respect to the problems with that those importer and that's where i think there's a problem ok so first of all  with respect to the edges of the import data the department said this in their remarks after reviewing the information on the record and considering the approach we have adopted in recent determinations in this and other aquaculture cases we find that  seafood by products are generally not internationally pretty commodities and would be reflected in imports of just so this is one of the reasons why they're saying you can't use while we were wrong to use the imports bats in the first place so that statement that these by products and i do internationally traded and therefore products are generally treated internationally right understood that i don't understand that that's what's the i guess i don't understand the government's position i don't understand what the point of that statement is that they're generally not in a trade or they were using that to attack so we can't use import undercuts the government's are what was the what's the main deficiency in your view for the what is it by to terrify the rich by to reject a price quote the fact that one it's a price quote which means it's a price in a certain period of time right it's one quote of these imports of chest x would distort the normal value calculation right so that the value would be more it would value of a whole fish or a waste product correct and that's one of my points i don't really do not understand the  relevance or significance of that why fish can can't cost more than a whole fish this is not comparing this is not this is not comparing fish than for example to the finished product and saying well it's crazy to have a byproduct  more than the finished product with the whole fishes an important into the production process to get fished in from a whole fish you've got to kill it you've got to believe it you've got to scan it there's there's things have to be done to get to that fish again so there's this concept that it's crazy to use byproduct necessarily distorts the normal value calculation i also don't understand why didn't this value distort the normal value when they used it in the final draft well at the end of the day i still but i believe i submit that the department's original determination was appealed to the c i team the c h p actually specifically instructed congress to look at the vital rich price quote already looked at it right and rejected it while they looked at it but more specifically to  is publicly available includes terms of payment and is tax and duty exclusive and congress also recognizes so they continued while a price quote from one company may not reflect a broad market average this concern is outweighed by its far superior in fact contain sufficient information to account for inventory changes and this is because the changes in the inventory of fingerlings which i understand to be the baby fish which are sometimes also sold as finished goods reflected the actual sale of finger repeatedly determined subsequent determination based on record evidence before that the status of unfit for human consumption it's really not used as a delicacy that what we are really commer when congress is issuing its preliminary final determination it's got tons of grease conference of pages of briefs by parties a lot of legal issues and these analysts are doing the best they can of like flipping through everything try to get it right and sometimes they over look at and sometimes they misconstrue evidence and don't really take it consider that the way they should mistakes happen and that's why we appealed and that's why commerce took the opportunity to take a voluntary remained to really evaluate real downgrade its decision and we best available information commerce reached the correct result then one has argued that it is exported and we talked about the court talked about this earlier that it's exported fish good for it and generally as to the point that there's no market for it this is just an it's not a fit for human consumption this is a cycle of the stuff generally goes into the animal feed and given the prices and costs of international shipping and if you want to prevent the stuff from spoiling you have to have refrigeration costs the stuff is in international trade and benchmark prices in fact show that this waste sells domestically for just pennies and so it doesn't make sense to internationally trade the stuff record shows fish waste fresh fish waste isn't internationally traded based on then once a few select samples that it provided on the record only even one trade it's frozen the frozen fish waste just generated from cutting picked up from the table picked up new pottery for nothing else has been done to it just common sense dictates that it cannot it should not be valued two point five times higher than the price of  so my little unsure of how to handle this i think maybe a little bit of a bottle and fish waste with with your permission then i'll finish up the last little bit of my director there just respect the fish waste air it's not just fish waste which the department valued which is under litigation here there was fish waste there was also broken meat right which is more valuable and fish again just to clarify the record also it just remember when the department talk about specificity when the department in the administrat at those imports at the sticks they deemed them to be specific so there's the argument about which is more specific but with the me want to get into that but both have been deemed by the agency at some point in this proceeding to be specific  the government today actually made a couple times to move the new government took their departments took a second look at the financial statement and then decided to make the inventory changes well the other respective wasn't the second like it was like the fourth in the final administrative decision the department used fine foods that's not under that's not being challenged here and they didn't make any changes to the inventory movements petitioners found the ministerial errors allegation and said to the department hey with your financial statements you've you unintentionally didn't make changes for inventory movements you should have done that because that's your course the department responded back to the ministerial errors allegation and this is what they said with respect to my clients the financial statements from my client find foods we find petitioners allegations are methodological in nature and not ministerial the treatment of changes in inventory is done on a case by case basis and find food financial statements lacked sufficient detail to determine the proper treatment of changes in inventory thus the department intentionally excluded any change in inventory from the racial calculations so that was the second time it looked at in a final they looked at the ministerial errors allegation when we issues get reminded back from the c i t back to the department the department issues a draft remained in that draft free man they continued to assert we can't make these changes to the fine food financial statements because there's not enough detail  this is this is this is in the weeds a bit right you have to look at that financial statement the department all of a sudden said wait a minute we can make these changes because of fingerlings right we can trace the fingerlings are being sold as a finished good therefore they are part of the finished goods inventory movement and there where we can make the change they do then the surrogate financial racial goes up from my client to over sixty five percent a number has never been seen before or sense in this case the because my client is integrated integrated fish company means they buy these baby fingerlings they put them in pods they feed them they grow them into whole fish then they process the whole fish or sell the whole fish so those fingerlings are important to the ramat to the production process they may sell some possibly but to deem that all of those fingerlings were part of the finished goods and part of finished goods inventory they're all to be sold the record simply does not support that they thank you