PROVIDENCE — Shire Corp., the state bridge contractor whose employee has been charged with rifling through the Department of Transportation’s computer system, has been suspended from bidding on any federally financed projects, an official with the Federal Highway Administration said yesterday.

The suspension will last until the criminal charges against Shire employee Anthony Mesiti are resolved, Doug Hecox, a spokesman for the FHWA, said.

Mesiti, Shire’s construction manager, was charged in June with two felonies under the state’s computer crime laws following a state police raid on Shire’s offices in Cranston in May. The case is pending in District Court.

After the criminal case is over, Hecox said, his agency could pursue another process, debarment, which would continue to bar Shire from doing business with any federal agency. The length of debarments varies, but the agency says they usually last no longer than three years.

Mesiti is accused of ransacking part of the DOT’s computer system used to manage and monitor the DOT’s hundreds of millions of dollars in construction projects. That area, protected by passwords, is supposed to be off-limits to contractors. A more-public part of the system is used for communications between contractors and DOT engineers.

The police said that a contractor with broad access to the computer system would have “a competitive edge” because it could read change orders approved for other contractors, internal DOT cost estimates, internal discussions between DOT project managers and engineers and information about future projects still in planning.

Shire lawyer Michael Kelly, however, said yesterday that the suspension is “without basis.” He said it and the prosecution of Mesiti are the result of DOT officials seeking to punish Shire for winning multimillion settlements from the DOT because of design errors by the DOT and its consultants.

The DOT paid Shire $5.3 million in September 2006, admitting that design errors delayed construction of a long-delayed, far-over-budget new bridge across the Barrington River. Earlier, the DOT agreed to a similar, $3.1-million payment to settle Shire’s claims stemming from delays on the Point Street Overpass over Route 95 in Providence.

In court papers filed after the search by police and federal investigators, the police said they found the user names and passwords of seven DOT officials, including the agency’s top construction officials, written on a scrap of paper on Mesiti’s desk.

Shire has been a major DOT contractor specializing in bridges. It will apparently lose a contract where it was the low bidder, at $494,847, to replace a bridge on the East Bay Bike Path. Shire could have apparently built the bridge because the bids were opened before the suspension took effect Sept. 3. However, Dana Nolfe, chief of public affairs for the DOT, said the agency plans to cancel that project and rebid it next year because there is too little time to complete it during this construction season.

According to the FHWA, Shire could continue to do business with the state so long as it didn’t involve federal financing. The DOT, however, is almost completely dependent on federal aid, and Nolfe said that “We don’t do any non-federal business with anybody.”

blandis@projo.com