The solution seems to be using the 'endorsed' libraries in this case. This must be achieved by using Maven instead manually copying the libraries into automatically 'endorsed' location(s).
This question seems to have the correct answer: How to specify the JAXB version in maven-jaxb2-plugin?
I had to do a minor modification. I used 2.1. versions in order to get this ok (same error when using 2.2).
<artifactItems>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>javax.xml.bind</groupId>
<artifactId>jaxb-api</artifactId>
<version>2.1</version>
<type>jar</type>
</artifactItem>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>com.sun.xml.bind</groupId>
<artifactId>jaxb-impl</artifactId>
<version>2.1.16</version>
<type>jar</type>
</artifactItem>
</artifactItems>