A former civil servant and his wife are today behind bars after being convicted of pocketing almost $543,000 of taxpayers’ money.Kyril Burrows, 48, and Delcina Bean-Burrows, 49, engaged in what a prosecutor described as “a systematic ripping-off of the people of Bermuda” over the course of several years.Their three-month-long trial saw 81 witnesses and hundreds of documents presented by the prosecution. The pair were found guilty by a jury yesterday of all but one of the 35 charges they faced, after the jurors deliberated for almost seven hours.The husband and wife sat with their heads bowed during the ten minutes it took for the verdicts to be returned, and showed no visible emotion.Burrows, an architect, took advantage of his position as buildings manager at the Ministry of Works and Engineering to commit the crime. He worked with his wife to misappropriate the funds over the period January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2009.Burrows dishonestly submitted invoices in order to get Government to pay for renovations to the private home he shared with his wife in Turkey Hill, St George’s. He also used public money to buy three television sets.The couple also worked together to funnel taxpayers’ cash to Bean-Burrows’ companies Ren Tech and Theravisions for work they should never have been paid for.The jury convicted the couple jointly of 17 charges of cheating Government and obtaining money transfers by deception.Burrows alone was found guilty of 15 charges of cheating, obtaining money transfers by deception, obtaining property by false pretences, money laundering and false accounting.His wife alone was convicted of two charges of money laundering.The charges they were convicted of specified that $542,778.33 was misappropriated by the couple. However, prosecutors presented documents to the jury illustrating an overall figure of more than $1 million that they say was actually siphoned from the public purse.Following the verdicts, Puisne Judge Charles-Etta Simmons remanded the couple into custody. She ordered them to return to court on June 1, when a date for their sentencing will be fixed.The maximum sentence they could face for money laundering is 20 years in prison. The maximum sentence for most of the other charges is ten years.The couple were originally charged along with two Works and Engineering superintendents, Greatfield Carmichael and Calvin Waldron.Charges were dropped against the other defendants before the trial began, and they ended up giving evidence as key prosecution witnesses.They told the jury how they authorised payments for Burrows without reading the documents and without knowledge of the projects in question.The jury also heard during the evidence how, a month after the crime commenced in 2005, Burrows was caught abusing his Government-issued credit card.Accountant General Joyce Hayward explained that Burrows was given a warning for breaching financial instructions by racking up $31,000 in unauthorised charges on the card, but he kept his job and faced no charges.He quit his post in 2008 after managers discovered he had used taxpayers’ money to buy a 58-inch plasma screen television. He left stacks of payment-related documents behind at his former workplace, Prospect depot. When the documents were uncovered by staff during a clear-out at the depot in late 2009, alarm bells went off over the fraud.The couple were charged with the crimes at Magistrates’ Court in March 2011. The trial at Supreme Court, which began on February 20, is believed to have been one of the longest criminal cases in recent history.The judge thanked the eight women and four men of the jury for being “extremely patient and tolerant” after they returned their verdicts. She then excused them from having to serve on a jury again for the next ten years.“Some of you have had threats from your employers. I know some of you have had threats of losing your jobs,” noted the judge.“What you have done forms a very vital part of the criminal justice system.”Burrows and his wife could now face further legal action. Midway through the trial, evidence emerged that they may have used their computers to make up fake e-mails from Works and Engineering officials. They presented these documents to witnesses in an apparent bid to bolster their defence, but that alleged conduct could now prompt further charges of fabricating evidence.Meanwhile, prosecutors have secured a “restraint” order on the house at Turkey Hill, preventing the couple doing anything with it. That opens the way for the Crown to seek a court order getting the house forfeited to the Government.