Yorkshire fined £400,000 over cricket racism scandal

Due to claims of racism and prejudice at the club over a 17-year period, Yorkshire has been fined £400,000 and given a 48-point reduction in this year's County Championship by the ECB's Cricket Discipline Commission. The turbulence sparked when Azeem Rafiq first made public his experiences at the club in September 2020 will come to an end as the club will not appeal the ruling.
The club admitted four charges, with separate fines levied for each. The mishandling of their initial report into Rafiq’s experiences brought an £80,000 fine; the deliberate mass deletion of emails and documents relating to that report brought a £50,000 fine, and both for repeatedly failing to act upon allegations of racist behaviour, and for failing to address “the systemic use of racist or discriminatory language” between 2004 and 2021 they were fined £135,000.
In its report the CDC said Yorkshire had “already been significantly punished financially, organisationally and reputationally” over the past three years, conceding that “the club’s current finances are fragile” and said it had “the current financial state of the club very much in mind when considering the appropriate penalties”. In order to avoid repeat major violations of cricket rules by Yorkshire, £300,000 of the overall sentence will be deferred for two years. The remaining $100,000 will be paid in four equal payments between January and September 2024.