Hong Kong’s former No 2 official, John Lee Ka-chiu, has officially submitted his bid to stand in the chief executive poll in May after securing 786 nominations from the Election Committee, representing more than half of all the voters tasked with picking the city’s next leader. Lee declined to tell reporters whether the overwhelming number of nominations made him a certainty for the city’s top job, but said he would continue with his campaign and had been “working hard to explain to various…