BT is preparing for a write-down of around £300 million, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday.

The company undertook a thorough review of contracts in its IT services division after it fell well short of profit expectations in the three months leading to September 2008.

Francois Barrault, then CEO of the BT Global Services, was replaced with Hanif Lalani, formerly the company’s group finance director, immediately after that financial report.

Lalani was charged with evaluating which customer engagements were profitable for the company, and which were not. “[He] is a very driven and determined guy, and he is putting in 18-hour days sorting out the contracts,” Ovum analyst David Molony told Information Age at the time.

BT has already written down £340 million so far this year in previously stated earnings that it now believes will not materialise. Adding a further £300 million will bring the total close to the amount of profit that BT typically makes in a financial quarter.