New Delhi, Oct. 5: India on Thursday reiterated it would not sign a key commercial contract with cricket’s world governing body despite threats it could lose the right to stage the 2011 cricket World Cup as a result.

The International Cricket Council said on Wednesday that all nations had to sign the Members Participation Agreement binding them to all the ICC events until 2015, but India was playing spoilsport.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India previously said it would not sign the MPA until certain clauses were amended, stressing the contract would badly affect its own commercial deals worth a reported $1 billion over the next four years.

The ICC president Percy Sonn said in a statement that if the BCCI failed to sign up, it "could not continue as one of the joint hosts of the 2011 World Cup, thus putting the entire tournament in jeopardy."

India won the right to hold the 2011 World Cup jointly with South Asian neighbours Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

"We have decided we will not sign the MPA in its current form," the BCCI secretary Niranjan Shah said on Thursday.

"That is the decision taken by the BCCI. We have been given a deadline till Monday to inform the ICC of our objections and we will meet that date. As of now we are not in a position to sign the MPA."

The BCCI vice-president Lalit Modi was even more categorical. "A few nations may have signed the MPA but that is not our concern," he told reporters after a meeting of the BCCI’s top brass in Mumbai earlier this week. "We are not forced to play the ICC events. Only if conditions suit us, we will play."