Telecom Plus to take writedown, sees profit below market estimates

* To write down 11 mln stg of unrecoverable bills at gas unit

* Expects FY profit between 52 mln stg and 53 mln stg vs 63 mln stg forecast

* To restate previous years' accounts to reflect writedown

* Shares (Berlin: DI6.BE - news) fall as much as 26 pct (Adds details)

April 16 (Reuters) - British utility company Telecom Plus (LSE: TEP.L - news) said it would write down about 11 million pounds of unrecoverable bills at its gas unit and that it expected its full-year pretax profit to be "significantly below market expectations".

Shares in the company fell as much as 26 percent to their lowest in about three years, making the stock the biggest loser on the FTSE-250 Midcap Index on Thursday morning.

Telecom Plus said it expects an adjusted pretax profit of 52 million pounds to 53 million pounds ($77 million-$79 million) for the year ended March 31, after taking into account an about 6 million pound impact from higher-than-anticipated leakage and theft of gas.

"Excluding this impact, the outcome will be below the level we were expecting to achieve," the company said in a statement.

The provider of landline, broadband, mobile, gas and electricity services had in October forecast a 2015 profit of about 63 million pounds.

Telecom Plus said the unrecoverable bills had accumulated over seven years between April 2007 and March 2014 and related to gas leakage and theft.

The company said it would restate its accounts for the previous years to reflect the impact of the writedown.

Telecom Plus said it expected adjusted pretax profit of between 54 million pounds and 58 million pounds in the year to March 2016.

The company also expects gas revenue to be 2 percent to 3 percent lower in future financial periods due to provision against the leakage and theft, it added.

Gas accounted for about 40 percent of total revenue, in the year ended March 31, 2014, bringing in 257.6 million pounds.

Broker Finncap cut its price target on the stock to 1,300 pence from 1,530 pence, citing a higher risk profile.

Telecom Plus shares were down 19.2 percent at 790 pence at 0857 GMT.

($1 = 0.6744 pounds) (Reporting by Aashika Jain and Roshni Menon in Bengaluru; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier and Anupama Dwivedi)