Karrimor asks me to add a nofollow attribute to a link to their website I've included in a blog post I did. Would love to have your comment on that request, why would they ask this?

Link removal request

From: XXX <XXX@sportsdirect.com>
To: YYY
Subject: Karrimor Links

Hello Fabien,

My name is XXX and I am responsible for the website www.karrimor.co.uk.

I am contacting you as the following link point towards the Karrimor website:

http://blog.penso.info/2013/06/16/packing-for-a-6-months-trip/
 
I would first link to thank you for writing about Karrimor and we very much appreciate 
your loyalty to our company however, due to Googles strict guidelines may I please ask 
for you to make this link a nofollow?
 
To manually change the link, you need to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> 
tag in your hyperlinks.
 
Here is an example:
 
<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/”rel=”nofollow”>Your Website</a>
 
The nofollow link will in no way affect your website, it simply tells Google not to 
pass PageRank.

If you are unable to do this, may I regretfully ask for the link to be removed to 
ensure that our website is abiding by the rules set by Google.

If you could please reply once you have rectified the link, that would be very 
much respected.

Thank you for both your time and understanding,

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en says there is 3 reasons to add a nofollow:

• Untrusted content
• Paid links
• Crawl prioritization

It doesn't go in any of them so I'm good I guess, but I'm trying to understand. I think @jlecour is right about the black hat SEO.

https://twitter.com/_julietelliott/status/535858744962596865 says I'm not the only one.