Updating from MariaDB connector J 2.5.4 to 2.6.1 causes an excpetion

I have just tried updating the mariadb java connector from 2.5.4 to 2.6.1 and I get a Null pointer exception trying to open a connection. I am using the DriverManager.getConnection call which works with 2.5.4, but just swapping the jar file to 2.6.1 causes an exception (2.6.0 also has the problem). The exception traceback is shown below. I am using MariaDB 10.4.12 on Windows

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.com.send.SendHandshakeResponsePacket.writeConnectAttributes(SendHandshakeResponsePacket.java:202)
at org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.com.send.SendHandshakeResponsePacket.send(SendHandshakeResponsePacket.java:187)
at org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.protocol.AbstractConnectProtocol.authenticationHandler(AbstractConnectProtocol.java:684)
at org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.protocol.AbstractConnectProtocol.createConnection(AbstractConnectProtocol.java:546)
at org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.protocol.AbstractConnectProtocol.connectWithoutProxy(AbstractConnectProtocol.java:1367)
at org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.util.Utils.retrieveProxy(Utils.java:635)
at org.mariadb.jdbc.MariaDbConnection.newConnection(MariaDbConnection.java:150)
at org.mariadb.jdbc.Driver.connect(Driver.java:89)
at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:664)
at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:270)
at com.quantel.QuentinManager.ds.mysql.MySQLBootStrap.getInitialConnection(MySQLBootStrap.java:48)
at com.quantel.QuentinManager.DBCluster.getInitialConnection(DBCluster.java:128)
at com.quantel.QuentinManager.QuentinManager.start(QuentinManager.java:329)
at com.quantel.QuentinManager.QuentinManager.main(QuentinManager.java:630)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.util.constant.Version.<clinit>(Version.java:84)
... 14 more