Exclude a transitive JAR dependency in Gradle

I have two projects defined in Gradle, projectA and projectB defined as a multiproject.

ProjectA has a dependency with spring1-beans.jar meanwhile ProjectB has a dependency with ProjectB.

The problem I got is that ProjectB has also a depepdency with spring3-beans therefore I need to exclude the Spring1 jar, otherwise it will use the incorrect version of Spring.

The Gradle conf file for ProjectA looks like:

dependencies {
    compile files('lib/spring-beans.jar')
}

and the conf for ProjectB:

dependencies {

    compile project(':projects:projectA') {
        exclude files('lib/spring-beans.jar')
    }
}

Unfortunately, this does not work. Gradle throws the following error:

Could not find method exclude() for arguments [file collection] on project

I have also tried with module with a similar output:

The description 'lib/spring-beans.jar' is invalid

Notes:

• I am using JARs dependencies because the project is being migrated from Ant, so I cannot switch to a remote repository even though I am opened to suggestions.