This was solved by writing a new function with the PrepareW command. I had the mySQL 8.0 Unicode driver installed. 

I cannot understand why I had to write a new function but it works. Following are the checks to consider (that I made):

1. Check the quotes against the values that you enter

2. Test with PrepareW statements

3. Increase the max_allocated_packet from 4M to 16M [in the more recent versions of mySQL it is default to 512M]

Regards,

Eric