Today, Wednesday 2nd November, the Blackburn Hawks IHC have been made aware of tweets posted in 2013 on the Twitter account of now Hawks Co-Owner Graham Lomax, that were considered racist in nature.
Initial investigations have led us to believe that the matter was dealt with at the time by the Police and that Mr Lomax was cautioned for racially aggravated comments and a public apology was made, however to enable the Club to carry out it’s own detailed investigation, immediate action has been taken by Club Director Carl Everitt to suspend Co-Owner Graham Lomax from all Club duties pending the outcome of that investigation.
In 2013 when the tweets were published, Mr Lomax was neither a Director nor Co-Owner of the Blackburn Hawks IHC and the Club was unaware until today of the existence of the tweets.
The Club have been assured by Mr Lomax that he is incredibly remorseful of any offence that may be caused by those tweets in 2013 and that the offending Tweets have now been removed from his Twitter account to avoid any further offence. Mr Lomax has given us his assurance that the content of those Tweets does not reflect the views he now holds.
As a club, we have a zero-tolerance policy on behaviour or language that is considered, discriminative or prejudice in nature and any reports of this kind of behaviour from any individual officially involved in our club will be investigated thoroughly, in line with our Club’s Code of Conduct.
The community team and senior management (which includes Mr Lomax) have worked tirelessly to engage with our community and this has involved, visiting schools (including BAME schools) and the Club has ran workshops to educate and share our passion for ice hockey.Through our Hawks Junior Academy, we have recently secured grant funding specifically designed to help us expand engagement with the whole of our community, including the BAME community, in Blackburn and the surrounding areas. We believe that everyone can enjoy learning to play or just watching ice hockey and we hope to give people an opportunity to do so through our efforts and support. We hope very much that this incident from 2013 does not damage the good work we want to continue to do.
Whilst we investigate this matter, we cannot comment further however wish to assure everyone that we remain an inclusive club that welcomes everyone regardless of their beliefs, faith and ethnicity.’
