Please note that DBI is officially discouraging the use of semicolons at the end of statements. ¹

> Some command-line SQL tools use statement terminators, like a semicolon, to indicate the end of a statement. Such terminators should not normally be used with the DBI.

I personally never had problems with that in the past when interfacing with MariaDB, but your driver/engine constellation with MySQL² may be different and/or outdated.³

Other than that only the use of weird unicode characters/whitespace/line-endings comes to mind, but analyzing this would really require you to provide us with a real SSCCE.

¹) tybalt already mentioned that in the meantime, but I prepared this post already hours ago and the site was always unresponsive.

²) not the same!

³) or you have an obscure DELIMITER directive which redefines the terminator to something else