A Figure at Troubled Companies Has Big Plans for PBS Program

In the three months since Mykalai Kontilai and his backers bought one of public broadcasting's crown jewels, the PBS-distributed "Nightly Business Report," he has moved with an urgency not usually seen within public television.

The first major change came Nov. 12, when he laid off eight people, or about 20 percent of the staff. His other plans, explained in a recent interview, are more ambitious. He said that there were "late-stage negotiations with a prominent 24-hour worldwide television network" to take the daily half-hour business report to nearly 200 countries, and also negotiations for a national daily radio program. A spokesman said that a pilot program to create educational materials to teach personal finances to returning veterans was in "the final review stage" at the Pentagon. A closer look at those efforts, however, yields a more complicated picture, both of the plans and the man behind them. In particular, more than a dozen people who have done business with Mr. Kontilai questioned whether his new endeavors would end with the same sort of problems that plagued his previous public television efforts.