executives that dealt with them; he claimed that the short sellers and the rumour mongers had brought down Lehman, although he had no evidence of it. Upon the examination of the issue of whether "naked short selling" was in any way a cause of the collapse of Bear Stearns or Lehman, securities experts reached the conclusion that the alleged "naked short sales" occurred after the collapse and therefore played no role in it. House committee Chairman Henry Waxman said the committee received thousands of pages of internal documents from Lehman and these documents portray a company in which there was "no accountability for failure". In July 2008, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox said there was no "unbridled naked short selling in financial issues". Regulations by market Several international exchanges have either partially or fully restricted the practice of naked short selling of shares. They include Australia's Australian Securities Exchange, India's Securities and Exchange Board, the Netherlands's Euronext Amsterdam, Japan's Tokyo Stock Exchange, and Switzerland's SWX Swiss Exchange. Also Spain's securities regulator CNMV. In August 2011, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and South Korea temporally banned all short selling in their financial stocks, while Germany pushed for a eurozone-wide ban on naked short selling. Germany On May 18, 2010, the German Minister of Finance announced that naked short sales of euro-denominated government bonds, credit default swaps based on those bonds, and shares in Germany's ten leading financial institutions will be prohibited. This ban went into effect that night and was set to expire on March 31, 2011. On May 28, German financial market regulator BaFin announced that this ban would be permanent. The ban became effective July 27, 2010. The International Monetary Fund issued a report in August 2010 saying that the measure succeeded only in impeding the markets. It said the ban "did relatively little to support the targeted institutions’ underlying stock prices, while liquidity dropped and volatility rose substantially." The IMF said there was no strong evidence that stock prices fell because of shorting. India In March 2007, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), which disallowed short sales altogether in 2001 as a result of the Ketan Parekh affair, reintroduced short selling under regulations similar to those developed in the United States. In conjunction with this rule change, SEBI outlawed all naked short selling. Japan Japan's naked shorting ban started on November 4, 2008, and