Former Yorkshire chairman Robin Smith blasts handling of Azeem Rafiq racism scandal

Former Yorkshire chairman Robin Smith last night condemned the department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s handling of the Azeem Rafiq scandal as ‘monstrously unjust’.

Smith also accused select committee chair Julian Knight of trying to prevent the truth from coming out.

Rafiq was permitted to make allegations against former Yorkshire colleagues without risk of legal redress due to parliamentary privilege, and the committee published his 57-page witness statement to an employment tribunal. But the independent report into his complaints compiled by law firm Squire Patton Boggs has not been released.

Rafiq told the select committee that he was released by Yorkshire due to his race and his complaints about racism, a claim which went unchallenged and elicited sympathy from the MPs, despite the fact that the independent report they were given before the hearing had reached the opposite conclusion.

As the Yorkshire Post reported yesterday, Squire Patton Boggs concluded that Yorkshire’s decision to release Rafiq in 2018 was ‘purely a cricketing one’ due to ‘his form and his attitude,’ adding that ‘race and religion played no part in the decision not to extend his contract’.

Knight had called on Yorkshire to publish the report last September, but opted not to release it following the parliamentary hearing two months later, a decision condemned by Smith yesterday.

‘It is monstrously unjust for Julian Knight to hide behind parliamentary privilege for their handling of this matter and for not publishing the independent report,’ Smith told Sportsmail. ‘It’s a calculated decision to prevent the truth from coming out.’

Knight stood by his actions yesterday, claiming that as Yorkshire had commissioned the report, any decision on publication was down to the club. He also pointed out that Rafiq (below) was called before the committee to share his personal experiences rather than be forensically examined.

‘The evidence that Azeem Rafiq provided the committee was his personal perspective on his own experience,’ Knight told Sportsmail. ‘Our committee chose to publish Mr Rafiq’s witness statement to the Leeds employment tribunal because it provided context to his experiences of racism at Yorkshire.

‘We made the decision not to publish Yorkshire’s own report on its investigation because we believed the onus remained with the club to do so.

‘Our focus now should be on reforming cricket in this country so that nobody need suffer the racial harassment and bullying that Azeem Rafiq was found to have experienced.’

Rafiq’s powerful testimony at DCMS had profound consequences for English cricket which have yet to be resolved.

The aftermath included the ECB temporarily removing international matches from Headingley and Yorkshire sacking 16 members of staff who had complained about Rafiq’s behaviour when he was at the club.

And Yorkshire are facing expensive compensation claims in relation to those sackings, and as revealed by Sportsmail, have already admitted to not following due process in some cases.

The ECB have subsequently charged seven former Yorkshire players including ex-England captain Michael Vaughan with misconduct for allegedly using racist language to Rafiq.

In contrast to Rafiq, most of those individuals have yet to publicly give their version of events, although Vaughan has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.