Compact leaves of structurally stable foliations

We prove that any compact manifold whose fundamental group contains an abelian normal subgroup of positive rank can be represented as a leaf of a structurally stable suspension foliation on a compact manifold. In this case, the role of a transversal manifold can be played by an arbitrary compact manifold. We construct examples of structurally stable foliations that have a compact leaf with infinite solvable fundamental group which is not nilpotent. We also distinguish a class of structurally stable foliations each of whose leaves is compact and locally stable in the sense of Ehresmann and Reeb.