As pointed by maven at https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder/http-builder/0.7.2 I could solve this issue by adding

buildscript {
    repositories {
      maven { url 'https://nexus.web.cern.ch/nexus/content/repositories/public/' }
      ...rest
    }
}
allprojects {
    repositories {
      maven { url 'https://nexus.web.cern.ch/nexus/content/repositories/public/' }
      ...rest

    }
}