Ministers likely to compromise over Chinese purifers

Date: 18/04/1996

THE European Commission could well pull the iron out of the fire next week, avoiding a damaging dispute over the imposition of definitive anti-dumping duties on water purifiers from China.

A compromise is now within reach, following a meeting of the anti-dumping working group of the Council of Ministers on 10 April, on how to impose definitive duties on Chinese powdered activated carbon - a purifier used by the pharmaceutical, fine chemicals and food industries.

Provisional duties of 66.8&percent; imposed in August last year were not made definitive because the Commission could not find a simple majority within the Council to support its proposal for a 38.6&percent; duty. This meant that when the provisional duties expired in February, they could not be superseded and importers reclaimed guarantees established in anticipation of the definitive duties which never came - the first time this had happened since anti-dumping decisions switched to simple majority voting in 1994.

With Belgium, Spain, France, Portugal and Greece supporting the duties and the UK, Germany and Sweden opposed, the Commission had to win over the floating voters - the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, Italy and Austria.

All these countries wanted the proposal to differentiate between the different types of the product, in the wake of a Commission investigation which revealed that although chemically-activated carbon was probably dumped between 1990 and 1993, this was not the case for steam-activated carbon.

The Commission would not budge on this issue but, with its revised proposal, has met one Dutch demand by offering to convert the duty into a 'specific' fixed money amount per tonne rather than a percentage.

“The Commission appears somehow to have secured a simple majority in favour of its proposal,” said a diplomat.

A make-or-break meeting of the Council's economic questions committee next Tuesday (23 April) will ascertain whether a majority really exists. This would avoid any possibility of legal action by the complainants - Dutch producer Norit and France's CECA whose case has been taken up by CEFIC, the chemical industry lobby in Brussels.