The presidents of seven Japan Railway group companies turned down a Transport Ministry request Tuesday to bear a larger share of the pension costs for former Japanese National Railways employees.

Transport Minister Takao Fujii asked the JR firms for cooperation in bearing additional expenses to help defray the costs of merging the mutual pension fund for JNR employees into the Employees' Pension Fund. The government is trying to hammer out a scheme to repay the 28 trillion yen in debts left from the JNR breakup.

"The issue of pension costs was settled at the Cabinet level in March 1996. We paid the decided amount recently in accordance with the settlement. We can't accept a change in the rules," said Masatake Matsuda, president of East Japan Railway.

The JR companies absorbed 200 billion yen of the 1 trillion yen shortfall when the mutual pension fund was transferred to the Employees' Pension Fund last April. The rest was left to JNR Settlement Corp., the semigovernmental body that inherited the JNR debts. The ministry is expected to ask the JR group firms to shoulder an additional 350 billion yen of that remainder.

The prime minister's Conference on Fiscal Structural Reform has been discussing measures to resolve the JNR debt problem, and a basic repayment plan is expected from a conference meeting today. The scheme is expected to include burden-sharing of the pension costs by the JR companies.

"We think it unreasonable to bear even part of the 28 trillion yen debt. When the JNR was privatized, it had debts of 37.1 trillion yen. We started with a burden of 14.5 trillion yen," Matsuda said. "The remaining debt ballooned from 22.7 trillion yen to 28 trillion yen because of the judgment of the national government. This has nothing to do with us," he said.