When Customs launched the CAPE refund portal, it placed administrative certainty in an asset class that Wall Street had already begun pricing.
As of April 9, 56,497 importers had registered electronic refunds totaling $127 billion, of which the government plans to return about $166 billion after the Supreme Court ruled in February that the IEEPA did not approve of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
CBP says valid claims are typically paid within 60 to 90 days. The schedule refocuses a series of questions, including what Governor Fitzgerald actually did with respect to duty refund rights and what Howard Lutnick knew about it when he was secretary of commerce.
WIRED reported in July 2025 that Kantar representatives approached importers wanting to purchase duty refund rights at 20 to 30 cents on the dollar, claiming the company had the ability to do “hundreds of millions” of these transactions, and said Kantar already had transactions worth about $10 million in IEEPA rights.
The proposal described an arbitrage scheme that would buy bad debts from importers looking for liquidity and recover at or near face value if a court decides the tariffs are illegal.
Kanter insisted the report was “absolutely false,” noting that Semaphore’s February report said the company had considered the product but abandoned it, and a spokesperson said Kanter “has never executed any transaction or taken any risks regarding the legality of the tariffs.”
As of April 21, these two records remain outstanding.
The structural position occupied by Howard Lutnick made the controversy flammable from the beginning. According to WIRED, he publicly supported full tariffs and advised President Trump to pursue them while Cantor’s investment bank looked for ways to profit if courts later struck down the same tariffs.
Cantor Fitzgerald is the public custodian of Tether’s U.S. Treasury holdings, linking Lutnick’s former company to one of the cryptocurrency’s most important reserve pools.
ethical architecture
Mr. Lutnick created that structure to create a clear line between his policy role and the commercial activities of his former company. He agreed to transfer his shares in Cantor to a trust for his adult children managed by Brandon Lutnick and to relinquish all financial interests in Cantor, BGC and Newmark effective May 16, 2025.
His OGE Ethics Agreement states that he will not receive any economic benefits associated with the ownership while the sale is pending.
Congressional Democrats argued the deal fell short of that standard. In August 2025, Sens. Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren requested that Cantor disclose the number of tariff rebate agreements it had drafted or finalized and whether Cantor or an affiliate was the counterparty.
Congressman Jamie Raskin then filed a records request in February 2026 against both Howard and Brandon Lutnick, asking for documents covering the agreement, communications with the other party, the Commerce Department and the White House, and nonpublic information related to the tariff case, citing “appearances of tariff profiteering.”
Both Congress’ request and Cantor’s response left the question of ownership publicly unresolved.
Reuters reported in February that the secondary market price of tariff refund claims soared after the Supreme Court ruling, reaching 40 to 50 cents on the dollar, up from about 16 to 17 cents on the dollar for fentanyl duty claims and 26 to 28 cents on the dollar for reciprocal duty claims before the ruling.
Reports through early April said some importers were able to sell $500,000 bonds outright for about 55 cents to 75 cents on the dollar, while others were considering debt-backed financing, with lenders generally requiring loans of at least $10 million backed by bonds of at least $20 million.
Bonds purchased at 20 to 30 cents on the dollar in mid-2025 would represent significant cost efficiencies if bought and held in a market that currently settles at 55 to 75 cents on the dollar in some categories.
The Congressional letter asked the other party, the term sheet, and any agreements entered into to establish whether anyone caught the move.
CBP’s CAPE portal processes refunds for importers of record and authorized brokers listed on government transaction records. Private market buyers and lenders have transferred economic rights through term sheets, side letters, and agreements that exist in private contracts completely outside the payment rails.
The transfer of past billing economics to third parties is carried out via these private documents, which are not visible in the CAPE interface itself.
Potential future consequences
The refund system will process approximately 330,000 importers who have paid affected duties on 53 million shipments, with approximately $2.9 billion in some items still requiring manual review, CBP said.
Given the scale of that pipeline, the next 60 to 90 days will create a massive public record of who received what. This record includes the importer of record. Private transfers to third parties are made on the basis of contracts entirely outside that system.
Mr. Wyden, Mr. Warren, and Mr. Raskin had already asked whether anyone held economic interests upstream, and whether any of those interests were connected to Cantor, its affiliates, customers, or arranged trading partners at the time Mr. Lutnick was developing or defending tariff policy.
The economic stakes would become clearer if records, counterparties or importer testimony surface showing that one or more duty refund rights were actually sold or brokered under the terms reported by WIRED.
A policy purchased for 20 cents to 30 cents in a market that fluctuated from 55 cents to 75 cents after the judgment yields returns that are easy to calculate and document. The Congressional letter had already established the legal and political framework for its findings.
At that point, the question of ownership chain will come down to transaction records, and the ethical structure Lutnick built around the sale will come under direct scrutiny to determine whether it worked as intended.
Another path maintains Cantor’s position of denial. If a signed agreement does not surface, the story of the operation will shift to a broader money-back finance market comprised of commercial banks, hedge funds, and private credit funds that currently lend openly on demand, although there are no reported ties to Kanter or the Lutnick family.
That version positions the company’s reported 2025 market launch as an open question, with the real story being the maturation of tariff claims as a financial asset class and an unresolved ethical dimension to Lutnick’s role.
That version remains at the center of the policy the Commerce Secretary has publicly argued, overturned by a federal court, for creating a nine-figure money-back market that his former company allegedly courted.
The portal launch revealed that the right to refund is now part of the federal government’s actual payment pipeline, that the secondary market has already repriced to reflect that certainty, and that the government has published a timetable for distributing $166 billion.
What Congressional investigators were asking in 2025 and 2026 is happening now in an active and documented market.
