SYDNEY, June 16 -- Mike Ashley already owns nearly a quarter of one of Australia's biggest footwear retailers. On Monday he offered to buy the rest, and the question on the trading floor was less whether he would succeed than whether he is really trying to.

Ashley's Frasers Group, the British retail conglomerate that already holds 22.9 per cent of Accent Group, launched an on-market takeover offer for the shares it does not own, at 65 Australian cents each. That values the rest of the company at about A$316 million, or roughly $225 million, and Frasers plans to start buying on the open market on June 30 and to keep going until the end of July unless it walks away first. Accent is no minor target. It runs more than 800 stores across Austr...