ZC Rubber excluded from EU tyre tariff annulment since first ruling didn’t apply

The Zhongce Rubber Group (ZC Rubber) was excluded from the list of applicable companies in the European Courts of Justice’s 4 May 2022 ruling annulling import tariffs against truck tyres produced in China. Reading the small print of the ruling reveals why. The initial ruling didn’t completely apply to ZC Rubber and so action against it couldn’t be annulled. In other words, the latest anti-dumping annulment is inadmissible for ZC Rubber, because nothing was applied in the first place.

However, since European anti-subsidy measures resulted in the European Commission imposing countervailing duty of “57.28 euros per unit of the product concerned”, and since that clearly did affect the ZC Rubber as well, those have been annulled. So, while ZC Rubber’s journey to zero duties was different to the other Chinese tyremakers listed, the outcome is basically the same.

Here’s how the European Court of Justice put it in its 4 May ruling: “According to settled case-law, an action for annulment brought by a natural or legal person is admissible only in so far as that person has an interest in having the contested act annulled. Such an interest requires that the annulment of that act must be capable, in itself, of having legal consequences and that the action may therefore, through its outcome, procure an advantage to the party which brought it…

“….In the present case, it must be borne in mind that Zhongce Rubber Group is referred to in Annex II to the definitive anti-dumping regulation. The imports of the products manufactured by the companies listed in Annex II to that regulation were ultimately subject to an anti-dumping duty of EUR 0 per unit of the product concerned.”

In other words, as paragraph 79 continues, “the Commission, in practice, fully exempted those imports from anti-dumping duties. Thus, those companies benefitted from a more favourable trade regime than that applicable to the other Chinese exporting producers, given that the imports of the products manufactured by the latter were made subject to anti-dumping duties, the amount of which remains positive.”

And therefore, “the annulment of the definitive anti-dumping regulation is not capable of having favourable legal consequences for Zhongce Rubber Group”.