Mark Hunt may be returning to the Octagon on March 4 at UFC 209 against Alistair Overeem, but his relationship with the UFC is still anything but fixed.

Earlier this week, Hunt filed a civil lawsuit against the UFC, the organization’s president Dana White and his opponent at UFC 200, former heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar. Hunt had attempted to resolve the issue in-house with the UFC, but after multiple failed attempts to campaign for change in the handling of drug testing, he filed the lawsuit at the Nevada District Court seeking financial damages in the region of “millions of dollars”.

Speaking with ESPN, Hunt explained why he was taking this course of action.

“I’m doing this because these guys need to be accountable for their actions,” Hunt said. “A year ban isn’t good enough nor is $250,000 dollars for a guy that made probably nearly 25 million on the night. Why should he get anything when he goes and breaks the rules.

“The UFC just push it off like every other time a guy gets caught and just say “oh he will go through the system”, but the system sucks—it doesn’t work properly. If I’d been caught juicing and made 25 million dollars I’d just say here have $250,000 I don’t give a f*ck. These guys don’t give a rats. They [UFC] aren’t looking at this and saying this is something we need to be looking at carefully. The penalties aren’t harsh enough.

“Me doing this is for me to tell these guys and the UFC that no, it’s not alright and you can’t keep doing that. Three times is enough and if I’d accepted the fight in Melbourne it would’ve been four times and that’s just rubbish.”

Hunt’s lawyer, who was accompanying him on the call, then gave the following update and statement on the lawsuit that had been filed.

“Before a penalty was imposed at the administrative stage by the NAC, the UFC felt like they couldn’t include such a clause,” Hunt’s lawyer said. “Now since we found out what happened at Brock Lesnar’s hearing and know that we know his penalty is only ten-percent of the purse amount, we then went back to the UFC regarding the UFC 200 fight and have said we are willing to accept the purse amount, less the $250,000 penalty in order to resolve all the penalties laid out in the complaint.

“We’ve also offered moving forward to accept the clause that includes that same formula that basically the UFC would exercise this ability under the anti-doping policy to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with what the athletic commission does.

“Mark raised something very important at the top of this conversation when he said “the penalties aren’t harsh enough”. What’s interesting is that the penalties are harsh enough on paper, they are just not being enforced.”