Priyanka Chopra shows off a Spice handset in Delhi on Tuesday. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

New Delhi, June 7: Spice Telecom is not up for sale and Essar’s attempts to buy out the foreign holding in the Punjab and Karnataka cellular operator is ‘illegal’. The licence clauses do not allow a promoter to hold a stake in two companies in the same circle.

“We are in expansion mode and are not selling out Spice Telecom. In fact, we have applied for six new unified access licences to ramp up our presence in north India,” said Spice Telecom chairman B. K. Modi, who is also the chairman of M Corp Global, the Indian promoter of the cellular venture.

However, the Modi group is open to the idea of equity partnerships in the six licence areas that M Corp Global has applied for last month. These cellular circles are Uttar Pradesh East and West, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan.

“We are open to the idea of equity sale in the new licence areas. We are in talks with many operators and financial institutions,” said Umang Das, managing director of Spice Telecom. He, however, ruled out any equity partnerships for its Punjab and Karnataka circles.

The Modi group has also announced today its foray into the cellular handset market through M Corp Global.

The company plans to manufacture these handsets at a plant to be set up at Baddi in Himachal Pradesh at an investment of over Rs 100 crore.

M Corp unveiled three mobile handsets. The Spice S500 model is priced at Rs 2,500 and is the base model. The 68-gm handset is one of the lightest mobile phones available in the market. The S550 model is priced at Rs 3,900.