Laravel failed to open stream

I've been tasked to troubleshoot and improve an application written in Laravel.

Since I almost always worked in Codeigniter, my knowledge of Laravel boils down to "I know what it is and where to download it from" :)

So, the application fails with the the following error:

PHP Warning:  Uncaught ErrorException: require(\Repos\PermissionRepo.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in \wwwroot\app\Repos\PermissionRepo.php:5

the PermissionRepo file looks like this:

2: namespace Wckphma\Repos;
3:
4: use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth;
5: use Wckphma\User;

the seemingly missing Wckphma\User declaration file does exist, and the beginning of the file looks like this:

namespace Wckphma;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
use Wckphma\Repos\GroupRepo;
use Wckphma\Repos\PermissionRepo;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
****

It cannot be the file permissions, as in pure desperation I gave all the user read/write permissions to all files throughout.

Any ideas, what this might be?

via Chebli Mohamed