the only solution that helped me in a similar situation was to declare the following dependencies in the pom
javax.servlet
servlet-api
2.5
provided
javax.servlet.jsp
jsp-api
2.1
provided
javax.servlet
jstl
1.2
org.apache.tomcat
el-api
6.0.26
provided
org.apache.tomcat
jasper-el
6.0.26
provided
as described here