August 27, 1985

Rockefeller Center, perhaps the nation's best-known office complex, is moving to offer its thousands of business tenants a new service. By this time next year, if things go as planned, companies will be able to buy their basic telephone service not from the New York Telephone Company, but from Rockefeller Center itself. Joining an increasing number of property managers in Manhattan and around the country, Rockefeller Center will provide a centralized telephone switchboard in each of its buildings - in much the same way it already provides such shared services as elevators, heating and air-conditioning. Installing such a switchboard will enable the buildings to get by with far fewer local telephone lines than they normally require, thus allowing tenants to save on their monthly bills. ''From the customer's view, Rockefeller Center will be the telephone company,'' said Jerome G. Lucas, president of Telestrategies Inc., a McLean, Va., communications consulting company.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl met today with his Interior Minister about what intelligence experts are calling one of the worst spy scandals in West German history. As they conferred, the leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party, Hans-Jochen Vogel, said the Interior Minister, Friedrich Zimmermann, bore ''political responsibility for the greatest endangering of security in the Federal Republic's history.'' Mr. Kohl's spokesman told a news conference that after a Cabinet meeting Tuesday the Chancellor would have a second report on the spreading espionage affair and then draw the appropriate ''personnel consequences'' - an allusion to an anticipated shake-up in the country's intelligence establishment. Parliamentary Hearing Set Mr. Vogel, suggesting that his party would seek the Interior Minister's resignation, warned that ''the scandal can in no way be cleaned up by measures against individual functionaries.'' In coming debates, the Social Democrats are certain to recall that two of their senior figures had resigned because of espionage imbroglios - Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1974 and Defense Minister Georg Leber in 1978.

Unlike the United States, where Congress cut off funding for synthetic fuels development on July 31, Canada is pressing cautiously ahead with a number of efforts to develop its substantial oil-sands resources, potentially one of the largest synthetic fuel endeavors anywhere. ''It is our ace in the hole,'' explained John Zaozirny, energy minister of Alberta, the province that has most of Canada's 1,000 billion barrels of oil in known oil-sands reserves. Some of the oil from those reserves is sold as is, but most that is extracted now is synthesized into a lighter, more conventional crude. Mr. Zaozirny and industry officials say that even with today's eroding oil prices, many oil-sands developments, with their low cost and enormous resources, make economic sense -much more than coal gasification and oil-shale development make in the United States. With considerable governmental help still available on both the Federal and provincial level, they make even more.

Companies T. Boone Pickens said he would reshape his Mesa Petroleum into a limited partnership. The company is caught with the rest of the industry in a declining oil market, and Mr. Pickens said he thought the tactic was the best way to ''maximize values to shareholders.'' Wall Street analysts saw the move as exceptionally good news for Mesa stockholders. [Page D1.] Revlon's directors approved an offer to repurchase up to 10 million of the company's shares for new notes and preferred stock valued at $57.50 a share. The offer, made as part of the company's fight against a takeover bid by Pantry Pride, represents a substantial premium over the current share price. [D1.]

Two of Brazil's senior finance officials resigned today in the first Government shake-up since civilian rule returned to the country last March. The Finance Minister and the central bank president both stepped down after their repeated calls for tighter economic austerity had gone unheeded by President Jose Sarney. Finance Minister Francisco Dornelles quit just three days after his deputy, Sebastiao Marcos Vital, was abruptly dismissed by Mr. Sarney for criticizing the Government's current expansionist economic policy.