Richard Fuld, the chief executive officer of bankrupt Lehman Bros., told Congress Monday, “I feel horrible about what happened.”

But Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who was chairing the hearings for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was having none of it. He upbraided Fuld for his high-living lifestyle while his company was going under.

Referring to Fuld’s several homes and an art collection worth millions, Waxman said, “It seems that the system worked for you, but it didn’t seem to work for the rest of the country or the taxpayers.”

Waxman claimed in a statement that Fuld was walking away from the Lehman debacle with more than $500 million in earnings.

For his part, Fuld blamed the fall of Lehman on a lack of confidence in the financial system as a whole and naked short selling fueled by false rumors.

Lehman had waged a war of words against hedge fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital. As early as last year, Einhorn said that Lehman was not revealing how much they were exposed to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Waxman said that at the beginning of the year, when liquidity was already a problem at the investment bank, Fuld depleted Lehman assets with more than $10 billion of year-end bonuses, stock buybacks and dividend payments.

According to Waxman, a Lehman executive allegedly told Fuld that if the bank could get $5 billion in financing from Korea, “I like the idea of aggressively going into he market and spending 2 of the 5 in buying back lots of stock (and hurting Einhorn bad!!).”