The U.S. Department of Commerce has launched a probe into whether major Chinese solar panel manufacturers selling to the United States have evaded trade remedy orders by falsely claiming that their panels are assembled from cells made in third countries, public documents show. Solar cells produced in countries like Taiwan and Malaysia fall outside the scope of the antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) orders imposed by Commerce in fall 2012, even if they are assembled into panels and shipped by companies in China. As a result, many Chinese companies in the wake of the trade case said they had changed their business models and employed a practice known as "tolling" to skirt around the new duties. Tolling - under which Chinese companies produce polysilicon wafers, ship them to another country for transformation into solar cells, and then re-import them - does itself not constitute illegal evasion. But what Commerce is examining now is to what degree those solar cells were actually produced in a third country.
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