When Cobb EMC, Cobb Energy and the electric customers who are suing them try to reach a legal settlement in coming weeks, a familiar face will be in the middle.

Former Georgia Attorney General Mike Bowers will handle mediation in the 8-month-old lawsuit, an attorney for the electric cooperative said.

The litigants, who are tentatively scheduled to go to trial in October, have agreed to negotiate until Aug. 15.

That means a settlement could be in place before Cobb EMC, a customer-owned electric co-op, meets with its customers to elect four new board members. No date for that meeting has been set, but the bylaws require that it be held in September.

The nonprofit co-op's 193,000 members are its customers, who have invested a little bit in the Marietta-based co-op each month as part of their utility bill. Some customers plan to challenge the co-op's relationship with Cobb Energy at the September meeting.

Five customers sued the co-op and its for-profit operating company, Cobb Energy, in October, alleging that transactions between the two companies had siphoned the co-op's assets.

Since 1998, Cobb Energy has operated Cobb EMC and charged a markup as a management fee.

A committee of EMC board members recommended Monday that Cobb Energy return about $13 million to Cobb EMC, including $10 million in fees that the EMC board did not formally approve. The panel also called on Cobb EMC to eliminate conflicts of interest in its governance.

The board members, appointed to review the customer's complaints, downplayed other allegations in the lawsuit. They said some claims were too old to litigate and that Cobb EMC had acted in good faith when it outsourced its business operations to Cobb Energy.

The recommendations are binding on Cobb EMC. Cobb Energy has not indicated whether it will comply.

Dwight Brown, 62, serves as CEO of both companies.

Attorneys for the suing customers, while praising the board committee, said its recommendations did not go far enough.

All sides in the complex case signed off on Bowers as the mediator, despite the former attorney general's prior professional relationship with the defendant companies.

On Jan. 30, Bowers and former Gov. Roy Barnes met with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to discuss complaints by Cobb EMC and Cobb Energy about the newspaper's coverage.

Bowers is out of the country and could not be reached Tuesday.

But Pitts Carr, the lead attorney representing suing customers, said he was untroubled by Bowers' role in the January meeting.

"I have confidence in Mike Bowers and the other side has confidence in Mike Bowers," Carr said. "He had some consulting relationship very early in the litigation, but it wasn't substantial."