Every registry is the surviving compromise of a domestic argument about what the public is allowed to see. Some publish residential addresses; most no longer do. Some publish beneficial ownership; some publish it in a form that makes finding it a small research project. Treating the set as one flat data layer is a category error, and it is the category error that produces most of the confidently wrong reports in this market.
Some registries publish residential addresses for directors; most do not, and the ones that used to have rolled them back. Some publish beneficial ownership; some publish it but make it hard to find; some require a paid login that throttles searching. Some let you search by director and find every company; some require a company number to find anything.
These design choices shape what a search can find. A person who looks clean on one country's registry might look clean only because that registry hides the field that would flag them. A person who looks busy in another might look busy only because that registry surfaces every nominee role a service company ever filed for them.
We keep an internal document, registry by registry, that records what each one suppresses by policy, what it requires to query, and what its known data-quality issues are. The document is boring and it is the most-used artifact we have. Every analyst checks it before quoting a finding from a new country. A quoted finding is implicitly a statement about coverage, and overstating coverage is the fastest way to ship a misleading report.
Registries are the foundation of corporate research. They are not the same as a global database of companies. Pretending they are gets people in trouble.