I'm not an expert on this particular business org, but there's a general emphasis in big companies on 'paying for what you use' so the partner program probably

I'm not an expert on this particular business org, but there's a general emphasis in big companies on 'paying for what you use' so the partner program probably directly comes out of his budget. In my experience this was true at Google and is true at MS. This means it's not just 'short term revenue' and instead 'your program costs way too much, it's not allowed, fix it'. Clearly this particular program needs to be an exception, but it's not his fault that universal policies are a bad fit for it (and he probably inherited it).