EAST MILLINOCKET, Maine — The New Hampshire-based investor seeking to buy the two Katahdin region paper mills will invest $20 million to $25 million in the Main Street mill as soon as the deal is signed and will seek to restart the East Millinocket mill quickly, one of its leaders said Thursday. The company would call its mill-operating subsidiary Great Northern Paper Co. LLC.

If the deal occurs — and he stressed that there are several obstacles to overcome by its October deadline — Cate Street Capital Senior Vice President Richard Cyr said the company would hire as many as 200 when it restarts the No. 6 papermaking machine in East Millinocket.

The mill “will restart in a matter of weeks” once the deal is closed, Cyr said in a telephone interview on Thursday, calling the restart “our focus today.”

Cate Street Partners bears a superficial resemblance to its would-be predecessor, Brookfield Asset Management, which faced criticism for how it ran the two plants. Both are deep-pocket investors in energy manufacturing who never claimed papermaking among their “core competencies.”

That doesn’t deter Cyr and shouldn’t raise doubts about his company’s commitment to the mills, he said.

“We are a serious company. We would not have signed a purchase agreement, regardless of its contingencies, if we were not serious or convinced we could get to a closing,” he said. “We would not have signed if we weren’t committed to running that paper business.”

“The way we are doing that,” Cyr continued, “is that we are bringing to the table people who understand the paper business, who are used to managing it, and we are looking to bring people back” to the mills who are intimately familiar with them.

Gov. Paul LePage’s office announced on Tuesday that Cate Street had signed an asset purchase agreement for the mills for an undisclosed price. The closure of the deal could come as early as mid-September, state officials said. East Millinocket officials hope to have a tentative tax deal with Cate Street in place by the end of next week.

State officials are hopeful that if all goes well, as many as 500 workers could be employed in East Millinocket and Millinocket in several months.

Great Northern began in 1897 when the Maine Legislature granted a group of Bangor lumbermen and landowners a charter to develop water power on the Penobscot River in Millinocket. Garret Schenck, general manager and part owner of the Rumford Falls Paper Co., built a paper mill in Millinocket in 1899 and began producing newsprint in 1900, a University of Maine history states.

Great Northern ran the Millinocket and East Millinocket mills until 1990, employing as many as 2,000 workers at the Millinocket mill alone, when a hostile takeover by Georgia-Pacific Corp. ended the GNP reign.

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