Sitewide links and owned site

[Kepass]

Hi everyone,

I need the community opinion on something. I am webmarketer and SEO for a pure player who runs a couple of e-commerce sites.

On one side we have bigsite.com. It makes all our revenue. I have been in charge for years. Results are good.

We have smallsite.com. It is starting. But small revenues for the moment. We have a new SEO working on this.

My question is :

We always had a banner on bigsite.com's homepage, sending valuable traffic to smallsite.com.T

he new SEO, has footer sitewide links from smallsite.com to bigsite.com homepage.

Considering both sites share same ssl, server and company name, I am quite sure this is out of google's guide lines and would hurt bigsite.com.

Do you agree that this is wrong from the new SEO, and that it could hurt my work and the search results for bigsite.com and smallsite.com, as well as team work ?

Thanks