I finally took some time to debug this and it seems the problem may be
related to libjlatexmath-fop-java.
In my setup I use LaTeX formatting from a docbook file to produce a PDF
file with fop and jlatexmath fop plugin.
My invocation of fop is prefixed by:
FOP_HYPHENATION_PATH=/usr/share/java/jlatexmath-fop.jar
When I remove this environment variable my document is generated without
errors (even though the LaTeX code is obviously not rendered)
It seems that the last update of the libjlatexmath-fop-java plugin is
quite old and in between fop was upgraded to version 2.0
Could the issue be coming from the jlatexmath plugin not working with
new fop version?