Lance Armstrong has been fined ten million dollars to be paid to SCA Promotions, the Dallas sports company that paid his bonuses, for lying under oath after being found guilty of using performance enhancing drugs.
“Perjury must never be profitable,” a Texas panel wrote (via USA Today) about the decision.
The panel also said in their findings that Lance and Tailwind Sports, the company that managed his cycling team back during his wins, “used perjury and other wrongful conduct to secure millions of dollars of benefits.” They continued that he “expressed no remorse to the panel for their wrongful conduct and continued to lie to the panel throughout the final hearing even while admitting to prior falsehoods and other wrongful conduct.”
“This award is unprecedented,” Tim Herman, Lance‘s attorney, said in a statement. “No court or arbitrator has ever reopened a matter which was fully and finally settled voluntarily. In this matter SCA repeatedly affirmed that it never relied upon anything Armstrong said or did in deciding to settle (in 2006).”
This dispute between Lance and SCA Promotions dates all the way back to 2004, when Lance sued the company for not paying him his contractual bonus for winning the Tour de France.
Lance has since been stripped of his titles and banned from the sport of cycling after using performance-enhancing drugs and lying about it on the stand.