Mean curvature of Riemannian foliations

Abstract It is shown that a suitable conformai change of the metric in the leaf direction of a transversally oriented Riemannian foliation on a closed manifold will make the basic component of the mean curvature harmonic. As a corollary, we deduce vanishing and finiteness theorems for Riemannian foliations without assuming the harmonicity of the basic mean curvature.