maven-tomcat7-plugin produces corrupted executable JAR

This is indeed a bug in the tomcat7 maven plugin version 2.2: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MTOMCAT-263

Use version 2.1 or wait for 2.3 to be released.

Remove the path from the configuration. And use 2.1 version of the tomcat plugin. Making those two changes in my pom file fixed a similar issue for me. Also I had cleaned the $M2_REPO/org/apache folder prior to rerunning.