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* To write down 11 mln stg of unrecoverable bills at gasunit
* Expects FY profit between 52 mln stg and 53 mln stg vs 63mln stg forecast
* To restate previous years' accounts to reflect writedown
* Shares fall as much as 26 pct (Adds details)
April 16 (Reuters) - British utility company Telecom Plus said it would write down about 11 million pounds ofunrecoverable bills at its gas unit and that it expected itsfull-year pretax profit to be "significantly below marketexpectations".
Shares in the company fell as much as 26 percent to theirlowest in about three years, making the stock the biggest loseron the FTSE-250 Midcap Index on Thursday morning.
Telecom Plus said it expects an adjusted pretax profit of 52million pounds to 53 million pounds ($77 million-$79 million)for the year ended March 31, after taking into account an about6 million pound impact from higher-than-anticipated leakage andtheft of gas.
"Excluding this impact, the outcome will be below the levelwe were expecting to achieve," the company said in a statement.
The provider of landline, broadband, mobile, gas andelectricity services had in October forecast a 2015 profit ofabout 63 million pounds.
Telecom Plus said the unrecoverable bills had accumulatedover seven years between April 2007 and March 2014 and relatedto gas leakage and theft.
The company said it would restate its accounts for theprevious years to reflect the impact of the writedown.
Telecom Plus said it expected adjusted pretax profit ofbetween 54 million pounds and 58 million pounds in the year toMarch 2016.
The company also expects gas revenue to be 2 percent to 3percent lower in future financial periods due to provisionagainst the leakage and theft, it added.
Gas accounted for about 40 percent of total revenue, in theyear ended March 31, 2014, bringing in 257.6 million pounds.
Broker Finncap cut its price target on the stock to 1,300pence from 1,530 pence, citing a higher risk profile.
Telecom Plus shares were down 19.2 percent at 790 pence at0857 GMT.
($1 = 0.6744 pounds) (Reporting by Aashika Jain and Roshni Menon in Bengaluru;Editing by Gopakumar Warrier and Anupama Dwivedi)
