Actually, it's more direct than that: Contacting EK about OnePass award issues will cause them to immediately tell you to contact OnePass - no confusion or frustration about it (at least on their end). Whether this is a OnePass issue or one related to the CO/EK relationship, and what the actual issue is, is no doubt buried deep within OnePass somewhere, and it would be almost impossible to get an accurate description of the "why." Not that it matters - as you've found out, what you're trying to do is explicitly prohibited by the rules, so it really doesn't matter whose rules they are or why they're there.