Reading a maven settings.xml when building with gradle?

I have a maven settings.xml located in:

 /home/u123/.m2/settings.xml

where I specify a remote maven repository:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<settings>
  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>default</id>
      <repositories>
          <repository>
              <id>my.repo</id>
               <url>http://myrepo/ </url>
          </repository>
      </repositories>
    </profile>
  </profiles>
  <activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>default</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>
</settings>

In this repo I have deployed an artifact - actually its a gradle plugin.

Now I try to build another project that needs to use this plugin/artifact using the below build.gradle file:

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'maven'

buildscript {
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.test:my-gradle-plugin:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT'
    }
}

But the build fails:

...
> Could not find group:com.test, module:my-gradle-plugin, version:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.
...

Gradle cannot find my-gradle-plugin even though I have the above settings.xml file pointing to the remote maven repository.

If I instead specify the repository inside my build.gradle file it works:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven {
            url "http://myrepo/"
        }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.test:my-gradle-plugin:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT'
    }
}

Based on this post:

http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/have_mavenlocal_check_m2_home_conf_settings_xml