The United States filed a civil fraud lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade against Uni-Tile & Marble Inc. and its chief executive, Xin Mian Pan, seeking a combined $290.5 million, $67.9 million in unpaid customs duties and $222.5 million in fraud penalties for a scheme that spanned roughly 503 import entries between 2018 and 2023. According to the complaint, Pan and Uni-Tile evaded antidumping duties, countervailing duties, and Section 301 tariffs on Chinese-origin kitchen and bath merchandise by routing shipments through Malaysia to disguise their true origin, using shell companies to obscure the supply chain, and submitting customs entries that undervalued goods and misdescribed their nature. The result, the government contends, was a sustained, multi-year effort to underpay duties that U.S. law imposed specifically on Chinese imports of this type.
The civil action builds on criminal charges announced in December 2025 against Pan, Uni-Tile, and additional parties, which included counts of wire fraud, smuggling, and international money laundering. The layering of criminal and civil proceedings reflects a broader posture by the DOJ, backed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection enforcement, toward schemes that exploit transshipment to sidestep the tariff regimes that expanded significantly after 2018. No relator has been publicly identified in connection with this matter, and it is not clear from the current record whether the civil case was initiated by a whistleblower tip or developed entirely through government investigation.
The dollar figures at stake illustrate how customs fraud penalties can dwarf the underlying unpaid duties: the $222.5 million in penalties sought here is more than three times the $67.9 million in duties allegedly evaded, underscoring the financial exposure that attaches when transshipment and misdescription are used deliberately and repeatedly over a period of years. The allegations in the civil complaint remain unproven, and no civil judgment or settlement has been entered. The case, and the parallel criminal proceedings, will be closely watched by practitioners and importers operating in product categories subject to layered tariff regimes, as the government continues to treat the Court of International Trade as an active venue for pursuing trade fraud at scale.