They were banned for 'association' - that makes me believe that even if you set up a fresh account yourself, if someone that was previously banned works on it, and Google finds out, you could still be banned.
Google is a bitch to deal with, and that they put up layers and layers of barriers to actually talking with a human being is infuriating and a massive risk to anyone doing business through them...
...however, let's consider the other possibility: Google is in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole with nefarious actors who are the ones putting the scams, malware filled trash, etc, on the Android store. They get knocked down and pop up again under a new account, $25 later. These people are never going to admit their actions when telling the tale, however, so I'm always a little skeptical.
That was one thing I appreciated about Apple's process, at least for a company account -- I had to provide various business documents, get a business search done, etc. If I get knocked down, I can't simply make up a new name and appear again. Clearly it isn't perfect, but it does seem to reduce the scum churn.
Some form of 'association' is probably unavoidable, otherwise it would be trivial to game for truly bad actors.
Big problem is that the current policy seems to insufficiently discriminatory between bad actors and accidental policy infringement. Perhaps they can start with short bans and rapidly increase ban length on recidivism.
It's probably good practice to get the source code and assets from the partner in any case. You may choose to sign and deploy it yourself, or if you delegate that to the partner and they get the banhammer, you can republish under your own account.
Republish a banned app without modification under your account is the fastest way to get yourself banned -- it kind of make sense when you consider how spam app works.
Once your app is flagged as spam/scam, the only way to recover is get a human review from Google.
Would a bank hire a security company that has a previous bank robber on staff? Would you put your kids in a school that has a previous child molester on staff?
You can make any move seem reasonable if you make a sufficiently bad analogy.
A more comparable analogy would be one where the hypothetical security company isn't told who of their staff is banned, or for what reason they were banned. Maybe they were a bank robber, or maybe they were just doing business with bitcoin, and it's the bank's policy to ban all such businesses. And the security company isn't just not hired - they're banned from being hired ever again, from 88% of all banks in the world.
Also, banned by Google != less than reputable.