Court confirms $1.9 million Arbitration Award against MotoGP racer Ben Spies. Judge Martin Hoffman of Dallas County, Texas confirmed a $1.9 million arbitration award in favor of Protac, Inc. and against Ben Spies and his company Speezracing on August 5. A three-person arbitration panel of the American Arbitration Association issued the award in May following three days of testimony and legal argument in Los Angeles last January. The arbitration tribunal selected by Spies and Protac was chaired by Maidie Oliveau, whose experience included service as a tribunal member of the Ad Hoc Division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport during the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympic Games and the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympic Games. Other panel members included former FBI special agent and Adjunct Professor of Law Edward Costello of Loyola University in Los Angeles, and Yaroslav Sochynsky listed in the 2009 edition of The Best Lawyers in America in the specialty of Alternative Dispute Resolution (arbitration and mediation). Protac filed the petition in Dallas, Spies’ hometown, to confirm the arbitrators’ award after Spies refused to comply with the award and instead sought to have the award vacated, claiming that the contract requiring Spies to pay Protac for its services was not binding and illegal. Protac initiated the arbitration after Spies terminated the parties’ contract in April 2009. The contract was originally to run through the end of 2010. Following termination Spies offered Protac the sum of $20,000 for a release of Protac’s rights under the contract. The arbitrators found Spies’s termination of the contract “wrongful.” During the approximately two years Protac served as Spies’s agent, Protac’s principal Douglas Gonda devoted most of his professional time to Spies and succeeded in Protac engineering Spies’s entry into the World Superbike Championship which he won in his rookie year (2009) and paving the way for Spies to enter MotoGP the following season (2010) as a rider for the dominant brand in Grand Prix motorcycle racing. Almost all of Spies’s current contracts were either negotiated by Protac or are extensions or modifications of contracts Protac negotiated. In sworn testimony given before the arbitrators both Spies and his mother Mary Spies admitted that they owed Protac money but nevertheless refused to pay what they owed. Gonda commented, “Speezracing wrongfully terminated my company. That’s not just my opinion, it’s the opinion of the arbitration panel. Now the Court in Texas has confirmed the panel’s finding in the arbitration. Speezracing left me no choice but to pursue legal remedies for this wrong. This costly, long, drawn out dispute never needed to take place. Ben is a great racer. I hope we can put the matter behind us once and for all so that Ben can concentrate on what he does best winning races.”