Santee Cooper can change its name to “Santa” Cooper.

The taxpayer-owned power company that supplies Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative pays its executives and lawyers handsomely.

Attorney General Alan Wilson and Gov. Henry Mc-Master want Santee Cooper to stop paying its executives’ defense attorneys.

The attorneys are billing the utility $475 an hour to handle criminal defense of company executives. This may be a state constitutional violation, Wilson said.

Santee Cooper paid 5 lawyers nearly $850,000 to defend executives who led the failed effort to build a failed $9 billion twin nuclear reactor project, the Charleston Post and Courier reported.

Santee Cooper, like its partner SCANA, faces criminal investigations and civil lawsuits over the failure.

The legal costs were revealed when Santee Cooper’s new chairman, Charlie Condon, asked why their legal department was millions of dollars over budget and why it had hired criminal defense attorneys.

In a letter obtained by the Post and Courier, the attorney general wrote Condon that he was “deeply troubled” by the legal fees.

He asked Condon to have the board halt the payments, because they may be barred by the state constitution.

Wilson asked the board to send the question to its rarely-used advisory board of top elected state officials.

Santee Cooper executives argue the attorneys don’t only work in criminal defense and its executives have not been charged with crimes.

The utility has been sued by users and power cooperatives over the nuclear project which the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating.

Santee Cooper spokesperson Mollie Gore said:

• More than $200,000 each was spent on lawyers for former CEO Lonnie Carter and its top employees overseeing the nuclear project, Michael Crosby and Marion Cherry.

• Nearly $140,000 was spent on a lawyer for top in-house attorney, Mike Baxley.