Unable to build maven projects from Build > Build Project for completely empty project

I have been facing issues with intellij in that it is completely unable to build/rebuild any maven projects from the IDE. The projects were building fine from terminal mvn commands and even via Add New Configuration > maven options. However the fact the the IDE itself never compiled the code I could not run any junit tests by right click > run test options. I have recreated this issue with completely empty maven project with one class and one test class with only junit as a dependency. 

Below are the steps;

• File > New > Project.. > maven
• Click next without any archtype selection and create the project. It should create empty project with no dependencies and no classes
• Add junit 4.12 dependency. the resultant pom looks like this;

<properties>
  <maven.compiler.source>1.8</maven.compiler.source>
  <maven.compiler.target>1.8</maven.compiler.target>
</properties>

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>junit</groupId>
    <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
    <version>4.12</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

• create a test class called MainTest in package org.example in src/test/java

MainTest.java

package org.example;

import org.junit.Test;

public class MainTest {
  @Test
  public void testIt(){
    System.out.println("Something");
  }
}

• Try Build > Build/Rebuild Project. It starts to fail with below errors suggesting it is unable to resolve the junit dependency

Below are some of my project and intellij settings screenshots.

Project Structure > Project 

Project Structure > Modules > Sources

Project Structure > Modules > Dependencies 

Projects tab

Intellij version

I am getting code completion just fine in the IDE an able to see all the dependencies in the external libraries section which suggest there isn't any problem with the maven resolving. This seems to be only problem which I try to build the project or run the test with junit from IDE.

Can someone please throw any pointers on this and suggest what could be wrong? let me know if any additional details are required