Essex County Cricket Club have been charged by the ECB with bringing the game into disrepute over an alleged racist comment made at a board meeting in 2017.
The charges relate to an allegation that the club's former chair, John Faragher, used racist language in the 2017 meeting and that it was not fully investigated at the time.
Faragher resigned last year when the allegation became public but strongly denied the incident occurred.
In a statement, Essex said: "Essex County Cricket Club has today received two disciplinary charges from the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) regarding alleged comments made at a meeting in 2017.
"These are not new allegations, but are the next formal part of the ECB process regarding issues that were raised by the ECB in October 2021.
"The Club takes this matter extremely seriously. We have co-operated fully with the ECB’s investigations since they commenced last year and will continue to do so as the process moves to this next stage."
Essex have been charged with a breach of ECB directive 3.3, which reads: "No participant may conduct themself in a manner or do any act or omission at any time which may be prejudicial to the interests of cricket or which may bring the ECB, the game of cricket or any cricketer or group of cricketers into disrepute."
Former Essex cricketers Zoheb Sharif, Jahid Ahmed and Maurice Chambers have also alleged that they experienced racism during their time at the club.
Sharif told the Mirror in November that he had was nicknamed Bomber by his teammates, while Ahmed described Essex as "a white man’s world where brown people were outsiders".
Chambers, meanwhile, told the Cricketer that a fellow player had called him a "f***ing monkey" in his time at the club.
