EU Hits India With Five-Year Wire Tariffs to Counter Subsidies.

The European Union imposed five-year tariffs on stainless-steel wires from India, saying EU producers such as Ugitech SA of France have been hurt by Indian subsidies.

The duties as high as 3.7 percent punish Indian manufacturers including Mukand Ltd. (MUK) for allegedly receiving trade-distorting government aid. Two Indian exporters, KEI Industries Ltd. (KEII) and Viraj Profiles Ltd., face a zero duty rate.

EU stainless-steel wire producers that also include Germany’s Hagener Feinstahl GmbH, Italy’s Rodacciai SpA and Spain’s Inoxfil SA suffered “material injury” as a result of subsidies to Indian competitors, the 28-nation EU said in a decision today in Brussels. The duties follow provisional anti-subsidy levies introduced in May and will take effect after being published in the EU Official Journal by Sept. 8.

The EU is also threatening to apply a separate set of five-year tariffs on Indian stainless-steel wires to counter alleged below-cost sales, a practice known as dumping. In May, the bloc applied provisional anti-dumping duties as high as 27.8 percent on the imports from India. EU governments must decide by Nov. 8 whether to turn those measures into “definitive” duties.

The provisional anti-subsidy duties, introduced the same day as the preliminary anti-dumping measures, were as high as 4.3 percent. The EU will refund importers the difference with the lower five-year rates.

Sweet Corn

In a second decision today, the EU renewed for another five years anti-dumping duties as high as 14.3 percent on sweet corn from Thailand to curb competition for French, Hungarian and Italian producers.

In a third decision, the EU expanded the scope of a 64.3 percent anti-dumping duty on automotive-industry wire from China to cover more forms of the product, called molybdenum wire. The bloc concluded that Chinese exporters dodged the levy by shipping “slight modified” molybdenum wire to Europe and lowered the minimum weight threshold to 97 percent from 99.95 percent in the description of the product covered by the duty, which aims to curb competition for Austria’s Plansee SE.

Source : bloomberg.com