The problem was due to a version mismatch between the libraries. One of dependencies(a company-private lib) used jadira lib.

Since Hibernate was excluded(as shown in pom), it was not present in dependency tree, but the code was built with different version of Hibernate. Upgrading this lib to a newer version resolved the AbstractMethodError.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.jadira.usertype</groupId>
        <artifactId>usertype.core</artifactId>
        <version>6.0.0.GA</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
                <artifactId>hibernate-core</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>