Question about "sneaky" vs. non-sneaky redirects?

[JCon711]

One of my client's biggest keyword competitors is using, what I believe to be, sneaky redirects. The company is a large, international corporation that has a local office. They use a totally unrelated domain name for local press and advertising, but there is no website. The anchor text in the backlinks automatically redirects to the corporate website. Is this sneaky or not?

[EGOL]

Is this sneaky or not?

   It's dumb... and kinda sneaky.

Dumb, because they would have been smarter to point the links to their main website, instead of using an intermediate website.

It's dumb because they waste money on domain registration and hosting.

It's dumb because there is a loss of power in the redirect.

It's dumb because Google doesn't like links on press release sites or any kind of site where you pay for a page that has pagerank-passing links on it.

So, its dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.. and kinda sneaky.

[LoganRay]

Is this strictly online advertising you're talking about? If so, that's just weird, I can't imagine a scenario in which I'd want links passing through a redirect. I wouldn't considered this sneaky or deceitful, but on their part, it's unwise to not be linking straight to the resolving domain and you should jump for joy that your competitor's links aren't carrying as much weight as they should.